Battery Metals

The Japanese automotive manufacturer, Nissan, has announced it’s energy storage solution for homes in the UK.

The Nissan Energy Solar system will collect and store surplus energy during the day, and allow homeowners to power their homes with it during the night.

This could save customers up to 66% on energy bills, the company claims.

“Nissan Energy Solar is just one step in supporting our commitment to investing in innovative energy solutions for a more sustainable future and intelligent way of living,” stated Francisco Carranza, Managing Director of Nissan Energy.

The price of the equipment starts at £3,881 (US$5521.65), which includes the firm’s home energy management system.

This system offers customers the ability to control the use of their energy in real-time, reducing carbon emissions through automated energy flows, storage capacities, and solar production peaks.

Prior to this solar project, Nissan announced it will be trialling and assessing microgrid system across Europe.

This project will understand how sustained energy sources are accessed by local communities.

The Japanese firm has also initiated construction on the largest collective solar roof in the Netherlands, which began in November.

In Elizabeth in South Australia, they stood in a huge line, only three months ago, and spelled out HOLDEN for the helicopters. Thirteen weeks later, after the plant closed and the last car rolled away, the talk began of rejuvenation, a new owner and the promise of the electric.

The proposal, from the British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, to refit the old Holden plant to make electric cars is still just a suggestion, but it has captured the imagination of a country suddenly keen to talk. On Monday, the idea was backed to the hilt by the premier, Jay Weatherill, and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union. On Tuesday, the federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said the electric car would do to Australia “what the iPhone did to the communications sector”.

Last November, the urban infrastructure minister, Paul Fletcher, announced a review into how electric cars could affect road revenue – a tacit acknowledgment that, depending on how the dice fall, they could change everything in the next decade or two.

By global standards, Australia is lagging behind. Only 0.1% of all new car sales in 2016 in Australia were electric, and that was actually down 23% on the year before. Other nations are powering ahead – Norway on 29%, the Netherlands on 6% and China, France and the UK on 1.5% of new cars in the same year.

Jafari has been calling on the government to introduce a temporary tax, stamp duty or rego fee exemption for electric cars – to “kickstart” the industry – and a national plan of action.

“The government has thought the issue is a lack of model availability and charging infrastructure, but in fact they are symptoms of our problem,” he says. “There is a lack of certainty that the market will do well. In every other country there is policy support, but that doesn’t exist here ”

If the government pulls the right policy levers, he believes, the industry will follow. Last year, the UK and France announced they would ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Volvo announced it would make only electric or hybrid cars from 2019.

In Australia, the government provides a discount on the luxury car tax threshold for low-emission vehicles and companies can earn carbon credits by buying electric – but the industry wants more.

The Department of Environment and Energy’s current prediction is that electric cars will be 15% of new vehicle sales by 2030. The CSIRO predicts 20% by 2035, and the Australian Energy Market Operator predicts between 16% and 45% by 2036.

“I’m not in the business of setting projections because they’re always wrong,” Jafari says. “Every year the battery technology becomes more effective and cheaper at a faster rate than anyone predicts. The predictions of uptake and driving range are reforecast higher every year.

“The question is, do you want to take into account projections based on how things have been so far and assuming nothing changes? Or projections for what happens if Australia gets its act together and provides support?”

Jafari believes the upward, exponential trend could begin between 2018 and 2020, which means all eyes are on Frydenberg.

“A signal has been sent that a change is coming,” Jafari says.

On January 12 Frydenberg penned an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald declaring the electric “revolution” imminent.

“The lack of takeup is not because of a lack of consumer interest,” he wrote in his piece. “What holds them back are issues relating to price, range and infrastructure. But on each count, there are good things happening, with more to come.”

Later in the year, he is chairing a forum with Fletcher to discuss measures to “encourage the uptake” of electric vehicles.

According to the Australian, his support sparked a backlash from his own cabinet colleagues, but on Tuesday, the minister doubled down, telling critics they would be buying one in a decade.

For the doubters, the barriers remain the same: a lack of charging stations, “range anxiety” over how far a car can travel, and natural reticence to adopt something new.

Investment is coming slowly for charging stations. In Western Australia, the Royal Automobile Club built 10 stations from Perth to Augusta, in New South Wales the NRMA is building 40, and in Queensland the state government has announced a 2,000km superhighway of chargers, from Cairns to Coolangatta.

But there are still only 476 charging stations nationwide. In NSW and Victoria that means 1.7 and 2.5 stations per 100,000 residents respectively.

This makes Prof Stephen Greaves, an expert in transport management at the University of Sydney, sceptical about mass uptake.

“I’d like to see [the exponential growth argument] proven right but I think we are a long way from that,” he says. “The Australian consumer is naturally cautious about making a change such as this. I don’t think it’s a priority of Australians, or the government.

“I was looking at all the things they do in Norway – it’s a laundry list. You can drive in the bus lanes. You get free parking. You don’t pay any money on toll roads. If you put all these things in place, and you put more recharging stations in, you will see a significant but small increase.”

Also complicating matters are the rise of automated vehicles and ride-sharing services like Uber. Last year a Stanford University economist, Tony Seba, predicted that ride-sharing would end car ownership. With these fleets using only automated, electric cars, he maintains, no new petrol cars will be sold after 2025.

As the futurists debate, government is turning its attention to the knock-on effects. Depending on how the pendulum swings, and when, electric car uptake could slash the revenue collected from roads.

Currently, driving a petrol-consuming car costs you money via the fuel excise – a government tax on petrol, roughly 40c per litre – which is collected for the purpose of funding road infrastructure and maintenance, but that technically can be spent anywhere.

This means the more you drive a petrol car, the more you pay – but electric cars are exempt.

According to the 2017 Productivity Review, the average vehicle is charged $1,334 a year: $607 from the fuel excise, the rest from registration, licence fees and stamp duty.

With the rise in electric cars, the CSIRO is projecting that the revenue from the excise, in real terms, will drop by 50% by 2050, blowing a hole in the revenue stream.

A solution, suggested by the Productivity Review, and hinted at by Fletcher, is to scrap fuel charges and instead charge vehicles, both petrol and electric, for how many kilometres they drive – potentially using GPS tracking.

Known as road user pricing, it can potentially also be used to charge motorists higher rates for driving on busy roads, or at peak time, which could ease congestion.

Road user pricing makes sense, and is more equitable, even in a purely petrol world, Greaves says.

But while it may benefit those who choose to take public transport and drive less frequently, road user pricing can be seen to penalise those who have no option but to drive – people in regional areas and outer suburbs.

“Some sort of variable rate is potentially a way to go,” Greaves says. “The simplest way to do that is by time of day. If you’re driving in peak hours, you’re paying a little bit more. It will make people think about what they do a bit more.”

The worry is that if distance pricing becomes too complex, or politically difficult, we will simply default to taxing electricity like it was fuel, halting the clean incentive.

But, with road user pricing, there is a potential for governments to finally balance the three concerns of funding, congestion and electric car uptake.

“You can in theory achieve all of this,” Greaves says. “You can tailor it for how clean the vehicle is.”

This is exactly what New Zealand is doing.

New Zealand has had a form of road user pricing since 1978. Their current model charges an excise for petrol cars (60c per litre) and by distance for diesel and electric ($62 per 1,000 kilometres).

But as part of a concerted effort to boost uptake, the Ministry of Transport has exempted electric vehicles from the charge until 2021 – saving each user roughly $600 a year.

Since the move, in May 2016, the number of electric cars has shot up from 1,300 to 6,400 – more than 5,000 cars in a year-and-a-half. In contrast, Australians bought 1,300 cars in 2016.

For now any change in Australia, according to Fletcher, is going to be “a 10- or 15-year journey”, and the review will not be formally announced until later this year. In the meantime, the future of the electric car is tied up in shifting projections and promises. Weatherill, Australia’s most vocal pro-renewable premier, is certainly trying to seize the opportunity in Elizabeth.

“He has ambitions,” he said of Gupta. “We’re assisting him in that endeavour … We’re prepared to get in behind it.”

 

China’s ultra-high-voltage direct current transmission technology has substantial potential in countries and regions participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, with related projects enabling long-distance, high-efficiency clean energy transmission.

“Renewable energy is often generated in places far from the cities and industrial centers that consume it, and this technology could efficiently send it over long distances to boost renewables and drive down carbon emissions,” said Li Baojin, chief engineer of China Power Engineering Consulting Group Co Ltd, the company responsible for the project design.

“China has demonstrated that UHV DC lines can be built on a massive scale with the success of its ±800kV Xiangjiaba-Shanghai UHV DC power transmission project and±800kV Yunnan-Guangdong DC Extra-high Voltage power transmission project. We are confident the technology will have a positive effect in countries and regions participating in the Belt and Road Initiative.”

The country’s two major power grid operators, China Southern Power Grid Co Ltd and State Grid Corp of China, started construction on UHV DC transmission lines in 2005 and have successfully built 11 project lines.

Potential markets for the technology include Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, the Philippines and Turkey.

According to Joseph Jacobelli, a senior analyst tracking Asia utilities at Bloomberg Intelligence, China’s UHV DC transmission technology has helped to realize the efficient transmission of clean energy from bases in western and northern China.

“There is very good potential for ±800kV UHV long-distance transmission lines in a variety of regions,” Jacobelli said.

“They are particularly useful in areas where power is not generated near the key areas of demand.”

Considering the future demand for long-distance energy transmission in countries and regions participating the initiative, the technology will have a substantial market in those regions, he added.

The technology is vital to China’s energy development as it optimizes energy distribution across the country, Li said.

He added that the technology has the highest voltage, carries the largest capacity of 8 million kilowatts and travels the longest distance of more than 2,000 kilometers, which can significantly reduce transmission losses due to its high efficiency.

The technology was recently awarded a special award for scientific and technological progress during the National Science and Technology Award Conference in January.

State-owned electricity utility company State Grid has landed ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission projects in Brazil, planning to build transmission lines from the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon region to the populous center-south region.

The first phase of the Belo Monte UHV DC Transmission Project is expected to start commercial operations by February this year, Li Lequan, deputy director of State Grid International Development Co Ltd, told China Daily in an earlier interview.

According to Jacobelli, Brazil, with its hydropower potential ranking No 3 in the world after Russia and China, is a country with a vast territory and energy consumption centers that are far from where resources are located, like China. The application of the transmission technology would be just as practical in other countries too, including Pakistan and India, in addition to Brazil, he said.

Rooftop solar may have been the fastest-growing segment within India’s renewable energy sector last year, but it is still not growing fast enough.

The Narendra Modi government has quietly downscaled its targets for financial year 2017-18 to only 1,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity. While the target was 5,000 MW till as recently as Dec. 21, 2017, the capacity progress report made available in January shows the scaled-down figure.

The original target (pdf) was 200 MW by financial year 2016, followed by 4,800 MW the next year, and 5,000 MW for financial year 2018. However, India’s cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar stood at 982 MW as of December 2017. A mere 271 MW has come up this year, data from the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) show. “It looks difficult for them to achieve the target of 1,000 (MW),” Amit Kumar, a partner at consulting firm PwC, who focuses on renewables, told Quartz.

The MNRE also seems to have acknowledged as much. “But as we speak today, against this target we have set up around 16 GW of ground-mounted and 1 GW of rooftop solar. So if I can admit… our rooftop programme is not doing really well,” MNRE secretary Anand Kumar said on Jan. 19 at a workshop organised by trade body Confederation of Indian Industry in New Delhi, the Press Trust of India reported. The MNRE did not respond to an emailed questionnaire from Quartz.

Yet, the rooftop solar segment had really hit its stride in the last financial year when it became cheaper than grid power for most commercial and industrial users, driving up installations. Driven largely by government incentives and subsidies, around 715 MW of capacity was added across the country last fiscal, according to a November 2017 report (pdf) by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
What’s the problem?

“The reason for the reduction is (that) the policy currently is purely for industrial rooftop projects. They don’t have too many benefits for a residential rooftop,” Anil Jain, managing director of Refex Energy, which sets up solar power plants, told Quartz. “MNRE is still working on residential rooftop to see how to make it attractive.”

The biggest problem the sector faces is that state electricity utilities and distribution companies (discoms) across India aren’t supportive as it could hurt their finances. As more commercial and industrial users, who bring the maximum revenues to state discoms, take to solar power, the revenues of electricity generators and distributors would fall. As of 2015, Indian discoms were suffering losses of around $67 billion, BNEF said in the report.
Further, India hasn’t come out with uniform policies around net metering that allows users to sell surplus power to electricity utilities. Net metering policies are required to enable widespread adoption of rooftop solar power, so that users can maximise benefits.

While commercial and industrial rooftop projects are already economical without net metering, for residential rooftop solar to take off, such a policy is critical since homeowners don’t use much power during the day, according to BNEF. Even those states that allow net metering have a cap on the amount of power that can be fed back into the state grid.

Since discoms were posing the biggest hurdle, the MNRE has proposed a few initiatives to woo them. For one, the government plans to compensate them by providing performance-linked incentives for each MW of capacity added in their distribution network, the MNRE said in a note in December 2017.
“There’ll be a difference in the next one or two years compared to 2016 and 2017,” Kumar of PwC said, adding that several banks, including the State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank, have committed to providing financing support to rooftop solar projects.

A chemistry team at the University of Waterloo, Canada, has achieved what may be a major breakthrough in battery technology. Led by Chemistry Professor Linda Nazar, the team discovered that the performance of a lithium-sulfur battery can be boosted dramatically by using a nanosheet of manganese dioxide. The increase has the potential to propel an electric vehicle three times further than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight.

Tripling the range of electric motorcycles could provide a huge boost to the fledgling industry by removing the primary concern most potential buyers have with the technology. If battery life can be extended in kind, and costs kept in line by volume production, acceptance of electric motorcycles will likely improve significantly.

The study revealed that the surface of the manganese dioxide nanosheet essentially transforms the sulfur cathode of a Li-S battery into a high-performance cathode that can recharge more than 2,000 times. Cathodes and anodes are the two electrodes on a battery, separated by an electrolyte solution. Sulfur, which is an extremely abundant, relatively light, and very cheap battery material, historically hasn’t worked as a cathode material because it dissolves into the electrolyte solution as the battery discharges.

The university reported that previous research by Nazar found that metallic titanium oxide could work to stabilize the sulfur, but the research published this week shows that nanosheets of manganese dioxide work even better. The main goal of this paper is to explain the mechanism at work. The chemical reaction that stabilizes the sulfur is similar to a chemical process discovered in 1845 during the golden age of German sulfur chemistry.