Lithium News

SUMNER, Wash. — Puget Sound Energy announced a new renewable energy project for Pierce County on Tuesday.

The agency said a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) facility is planned to be built in Sumner off of East Valley Highway.

Puget Sound Energy said will help maintain reliability during peak energy demand. PSE also said it allows them to deliver clean energy, as required by “Washington’s aggressive clean energy requirements.”

The 200-megawatt lithium-ion battery storage facility has already been a topic of discussion in Sumner for months, and some residents have safety, health, and environmental concerns about the facility.

A site plan from the city shows the city’s water well is right next to the planned facility.

“It’s on top of our aquifer for the Dieringer Well, right on top of the aquifer,” said Randall Adams, a longtime Sumner resident. “To me, that’s almost like sacred ground. You don’t go playing with aquifers that you’re going to drink.”

Other residents said there are concerns over fire risk and impacts on the White River, which is nearby.

“There’s concern to make sure the city is keeping track of what types of mitigation procedures are being put into place to make sure that there isn’t seepage from the batteries, from ion batteries, into the groundwater,” Nick Biermann said.

On Bright Night Power’s website, it says:

“There are no emissions or contamination from BESS facilities to the air, water, or soil… Only a few components of the battery system contain toxic materials, but these exist in small quantities and are safely encapsulated within the battery structure.”

When it comes to the well, the City of Sumner said it reviewed any possible impacts.

“That was one of those things we looked at through all the SEPA process,” said Carman Palmer, City of Sumner communications director. “So, wells were of concern to us, so we can reassure them, we thought of it and we looked at it, worked through it with the health department, lots of eyes on it already.”

The City of Sumner issued a conditional use permit for the facility in August.

“There’s very rarely anything we can outright deny. It’s going through the concerns and then seeing if it aligns, and I don’t think there’s any huge red flags,” Palmer said.

A multi-institutional research team led by Georgia Tech’s Hailong Chen has developed a new, low-cost cathode that could radically improve lithium-ion batteries (LIBs)—potentially transforming the electric vehicle (EV) market and large-scale energy storage systems.

“For a long time, people have been looking for a lower-cost, more sustainable alternative to existing cathode materials. I think we’ve got one,” said Chen, an associate professor with appointments in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

The revolutionary material, iron chloride (FeCl₃), costs a mere 1%–2% of typical cathode materials and can store the same amount of electricity. Cathode materials affect capacity, energy, and efficiency, playing a major role in a battery’s performance, lifespan, and affordability.

“Our cathode can be a game-changer,” said Chen, whose team describes its work in Nature Sustainability. “It would greatly improve the EV market—and the whole lithium-ion battery market.”

First commercialized by Sony in the early 1990s, LIBs sparked an explosion in personal electronics, such as smartphones and tablets. The technology eventually advanced to fuel electric vehicles, providing a reliable, rechargeable, high-density energy source. But unlike personal electronics, large-scale energy users like EVs are especially sensitive to the cost of LIBs.

Batteries are currently responsible for about 50% of an EV’s total cost, which makes these clean-energy cars more expensive than their internal combustion, greenhouse-gas-spewing cousins. The Chen team’s invention could change that.

Building a better battery

Compared to old-fashioned alkaline and lead-acid batteries, LIBs store more energy in a smaller package and power a device longer between charges. But LIBs contain expensive metals, including semiprecious elements such as cobalt and nickel, and they have a high manufacturing cost.

So far, only four types of cathodes have been successfully commercialized for LIBs. Chen’s would be the fifth, and it would represent a big step forward in battery technology: the development of an all-solid-state LIB.

Conventional LIBs use liquid electrolytes to transport lithium ions for storing and releasing energy. They have hard limits on how much energy can be stored, and they can leak and catch fire. But all-solid-state LIBs use solid electrolytes, dramatically boosting a battery’s efficiency and reliability and making it safer and capable of holding more energy. These batteries, still in the development and testing phase, would be a considerable improvement.

As researchers and manufacturers across the planet race to make all-solid-state technology practical, Chen and his collaborators have developed an affordable and sustainable solution. With the FeCl₃ cathode, a solid electrolyte, and a lithium metal anode, the cost of their whole battery system is 30%–40% of current LIBs.

“This could not only make EVs much cheaper than internal combustion cars, but it provides a new and promising form of large-scale energy storage, enhancing the resilience of the electrical grid,” Chen said. “In addition, our cathode would greatly improve the sustainability and supply chain stability of the EV market.”

Solid start to new discovery

Chen’s interest in FeCl₃ as a cathode material originated with his lab’s research into solid electrolyte materials. Starting in 2019, his lab tried to make solid-state batteries using chloride-based solid electrolytes with traditional commercial oxide-based cathodes. It didn’t go well—the cathode and electrolyte materials didn’t get along.

The researchers thought a chloride-based cathode could provide a better pairing with the chloride electrolyte to offer better battery performance.

“We found a candidate (FeCl₃) worth trying, as its crystal structure is potentially suitable for storing and transporting Li ions, and fortunately, it functioned as we expected,” said Chen.

Currently, the most popularly used cathodes in EVs are oxides and require a gigantic amount of costly nickel and cobalt, heavy elements that can be toxic and pose an environmental challenge. In contrast, the Chen team’s cathode contains only iron (Fe) and chlorine (Cl)—abundant, affordable, widely used elements found in steel and table salt.

In their initial tests, FeCl₃ was found to perform as well as or better than the other, much more expensive cathodes. For example, it has a higher operational voltage than the popularly used cathode LiFePO₄ (lithium iron phosphate, or LFP), which is the electrical force a battery provides when connected to a device, similar to water pressure from a garden hose.

This technology may be less than five years from commercial viability in EVs. For now, the team will continue investigating FeCl₃ and related materials, according to Chen. The work was led by Chen and postdoc Zhantao Liu (the lead author of the study).

Collaborators included researchers from Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School (Ting Zhu) and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (Yuanzhi Tang), as well as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Jue Liu) and the University of Houston (Shuo Chen).

“We want to make the materials as perfect as possible in the lab and understand the underlying functioning mechanisms,” Chen said. “But we are open to opportunities to scale up the technology and push it toward commercial applications.”

As power utilities and industrial companies seek to use more renewable energy, the market for grid-scale batteries is expanding rapidly. Alternatives to lithium-ion technology may provide environmental, labor, and safety benefits. And these new chemistries can work in markets like the electric grid and industrial applications that lithium doesn’t address well.

“I think the market for longer-duration storage is just now emerging,” said Mark Higgins, chief commercial officer and president of North America at Redflow. “We have a lot of… very rapid scale-up in the types of projects that we’re working on and the size of projects that we’re working on. We’ve deployed about 270 projects around the world. Most of them have been small off-grid or remote-grid systems. What we’re seeing today is much more grid-connected types of projects.”

“Demand… seems to be increasing every day,” said Giovanni Damato, president of CMBlu Energy. Media projections of growth in this space are huge. “We’re really excited about the opportunity to… just be able to play in that space and provide as much capacity as possible.”

New industrial markets are also becoming active. Chemical plants, steel plants, and metal processing plants have not been able to deploy renewable energy well so far due to batteries’ fire hazards, said Mukesh Chatter, co-founder and CEO of Alsym Energy. “When you already are generating a lot of heat in these plants and there’s a risk of fire to begin with, you don’t want to deploy any battery that’s flammable.”

Chatter said that the definition of long-duration energy storage is not agreed upon by industry organizations. Still, there are a number of potential contenders developing storage for this market. Here, we’ll look at Redflow, CMBlu Energy, and BASF Stationary Energy Storage.

Zinc-bromine batteries

Redflow has been manufacturing zinc-bromine flow batteries since 2010, Higgins said. These batteries do not require the critical minerals that lithium-ion batteries need, which are sometimes from parts of the world that have unsafe labor practices or geopolitical risks. The minerals for these zinc-bromine batteries are affordable and easy to obtain.

Flow batteries contain liquid or gaseous electrolytes that flow through cells from tanks, according to the International Flow Battery Forum website:

The interconversion of energy between electrical and stored chemical energy takes place in the electrochemical cell. This consists of two half cells separated by a porous or an ion-exchange membrane. The battery can be constructed of low-cost and readily available materials, such as thermoplastics and carbon-based materials. Many parts of the battery can be recycled. Electrolytes can be recovered and reused, leading to low cost of ownership.

Building these can be quite different from other batteries. “I would say that our manufacturing process is much more akin to… an automotive manufacturing process than to [an] electronics manufacturing process… like [a] lithium-ion battery,” Higgins said. “Essentially, it is assembling batteries that are made out of plastic tanks, pumps, fans, [and] tubing. It’s a flow battery, so it’s a liquid that flows through the system that goes through an electrical stack that has cells in it, which is where most of Redflow’s intellectual property resides. The rest of the battery is all… parts that we can obtain just about anywhere.”

The charging and discharging happen inside an electrical stack. In the stack, zinc is plated onto a carbon surface during the charging process. It is then dissolved into the liquid during the discharging process, Higgins said.

The zinc-bromine electrolyte is derived from an industrial chemical that has been used in the oil and gas sector for a long time, Higgins added.

This battery cannot catch fire, and all of its parts are recyclable, Higgins told Ars. “You don’t have any of the toxic materials that you do in a lithium-ion battery.” The electrolyte liquid can be reused in other batteries. If it’s contaminated, it can be used by the oil and gas industry. If the battery leaks, the contents can be neutralized quickly and are subsequently not hazardous.

“Right now, we manufacture our batteries in Thailand,” Higgins said. “The process and wages are all fair wages and we follow all relevant environmental and labor standards.” The largest sources of bromine come from the Dead Sea or within the United States. The zinc comes from Northern Europe, the United States, or Canada.

The batteries typically use an annual maintenance program to replace components that wear out or fail, something that’s not possible with many other battery types. Higgins estimated that two to four years down the road, this technology will be “completely competitive with lithium-ion” from a cost perspective. Some government grants have helped with the commercialization process.

Redox-flow batteries go Blu

A second company, CMBlu Energy, is now starting to take commercial orders for its Organic SolidFlow batteries, Damato, its president, told Ars. It has already deployed several smaller systems in Europe. And it recently announced that it is partnering with Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory to study how these batteries can be used in microgrids.

Organic SolidFlow batteries are redox-flow batteries with a twist, Damato said. They have stationary solids in their tanks, which increases their energy-storage capacity compared to conventional flow batteries. They use organic (carbon-based) polymers that hold and transfer charge, which can be sourced from anywhere. This means that they do not require any materials that come from conflict countries that have unsafe working conditions.

The batteries are designed in modular units that are around the same size as standing desks at their highest position, Damato said, with four battery stacks connected in series. The modules contain storage tanks and cell stacks. Each cell in the stack has a membrane that separates its two electrodes. The number of cells in a stack can be customized. A module weighs around two tons and supplies power for five to 10 hours.

Thermal runaway is a non-issue with this redox-flow battery because of its inherent chemistry and the fact that it uses an aqueous solution, Damato said.

For maintenance, CMBlu Energy recommends regular visual inspections, including checking the pumps and valves and looking for leaks—the maintenance requirements are relatively minimal. Some of the performance monitoring for leaks is automated, along with data collection on pressure and temperature. The electrolyte needs to be rejuvenated approximately every 10 years, depending on the environmental conditions of the installation.

Since the batteries are made of plastic, they can be recycled similarly to other plastics. Damato said this is cost-effective. The support structures and copper wiring are also recyclable, as are the solid and liquid electrolytes.

Sulfur-sodium batteries are hot

A third company, BASF SES, is selling a battery made by Japanese manufacturer NGK Insulators, the NAS Battery, that has sulfur as the positive electrode and sodium as the negative one. The electrolyte is a beta-alumina ceramic tube. While the battery discharges, the sulfur is reduced to polysulfide, and the sodium is oxidized; this process is reversed during charging. When the battery is in use, it runs at around 300° C, with both the sodium and the sulfur in their liquid state.

According to Justin Williams, senior account executive at Trevi Communications, “Beta-alumina solid electrolyte (BASE) is sodium polyaluminate. The material has a specific crystal structure [that] enables very fast ion transport. It is used as an ion conductor with high selectivity.”

There have been over 250 projects utilizing these batteries, according to Caroline Brannock, senior battery technology sales manager at BASF SES.

The batteries are packaged in 20-foot-long shipping containers that has six modules that collectively provide 1.45 megawatt-hours, Brannock said. The shipping containers are usually used in groups of four.

This technology does not make use of any of the critical minerals that are problematic in lithium-ion batteries. In addition to sodium and sulfur, NGK Insulators uses oxygen, steel, carbon, and silica-based materials, all of which are inexpensive and widely available. Brannock said the details of how these are combined during manufacturing is confidential.

The safety tests for the NAS Battery included short-circuiting the modules, putting the modules in fires, and submerging them, none of which caused leakage or fires in the modules. Lighting an individual cell on fire resulted in similarly safe results. A drop test showed that only the enclosure was damaged, and no fire or leaks occurred.

“When we’re talking about climate resiliency, the battery can withstand a great deal,” Brannock said. She mentioned that it tolerates heat and cold as well as high-salinity environments. The container also gives it a layer of protection.

In Japan, NGK Insulators partners with companies that recycle end-of-life batteries. Installations outside Japan are only just reaching end-of-life, and the company is currently identifying local recycling partners.

To date, there are no uniform standards for research into solid-state batteries, which are also to be used in e-mobility in the long term—even though billions are being invested in this area worldwide. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have identified the reasons for this and report on them in the journal Nature Energy.

Solid-state or all-solid-state batteries (ASSB) promise a significant increase in energy density compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries. This is why they are considered the future energy storage system for electromobility. However, there is no standardized protocol for the validation of solid-state battery cells in battery research.

When results are published, it is often not clear whether they are even comparable with results from other research groups. Therefore, the starting point for reproducibility and comparability of cell tests must be created in order to be able to reliably evaluate innovations in this technology.

“At least once a week we hear about a new breakthrough in battery cell performance that is set to revolutionize e-mobility or energy storage in general. However, very few of these ‘hyped up’ reports make it into applications outside the lab.

“In many cases, this is because they cannot be reproduced outside the original laboratory,” reports Prof. Dr. Nella M. Vargas-Barbosa, Chair of Electrochemistry at the Bavarian Center for Battery Technology (BayBatt) at the University of Bayreuth. She is the lead author of a recently published article.

In this study, the researchers measured how much the properties of simple test cells varied de facto: 21 research groups with research and industry-recognized expertise in solid-state batteries were provided with the same battery materials and a predefined electrochemical test procedure—but each group used its own method for assembling the cells and individual, non-standardized measurement techniques.

“We now report on the huge differences in the way the battery cells were assembled and how they performed in comparison, including variations in the applied pressure and the composition of the negative electrode,” state the researchers.

“The spread of performance data between the differently built battery cells ended up being immense. While this may be worrying, it is a first step towards a necessary improvement. The study identified some of the cell preparation conditions that can strongly influence battery performance, such as the amount of lithium metal in the negative electrode.

“This study is special because it involves many international groups that are established in the field of solid-state batteries. We all collectively recognize that we need to do more to improve the comparability and reproducibility of the work we report on.”