Lithium News

Devon-based wholesaler, Philip Dennis Foodservice, is using three battery storage units from Anesco to maximise on-site generation, cut carbon and grid charges, and earn balancing services revenue.

The battery storage units have a combined capacity of 3.75MW (3.75MWh) for which Anesco will provide operations and maintenance. The firm also has a 256kW Tesla battery on site, alongside solar PV and wind turbines.

Director, Peter Dennis, said cutting its carbon footprint by investing in storage and renewables is important to the firm.

“It is a key USP and differentiates us from others in the market. We were quick to recognise the opportunity that solar and battery storage presents and are already achieving good returns.”

Anesco executive chairman, Steve Shine, said storage and renewables “present a fantastic opportunity to diversify and capitalise on new revenue streams” to UK businesses. As a result, the firm now claims a 380MW battery storage order book.

Recent changes in the economics of the energy storage are causing a shift in the market for lithium-ion batteries, which could accentuate China’s position in the global energy storage market.

Surging demand has led to a shortage of nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries, giving lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries a chance to gain market share.

“The current supply tightness for NMC batteries is opening up doors for LFP batteries as they are seeing a growing interest from storage vendors for not just power but also energy applications,” Mitalee Gupta, energy storage analyst at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, told Utility Dive via email.

In the short term, that shortage could lead to a slowdown in expected price declines for batteries. Li-ion battery rack prices declined by more than 20% year-over-year in 2015 and 2016, and came down by almost 15% in 2017, according to Wood Mackenzie.

The research firm forecasts another 14% decline in prices in 2018, but noted that price declines have “slowed significantly over the last quarter,” in the most recent Energy Storage Monitor.

Choosing battery chemistries

Li-ion batteries dominate the energy storage market, but they are not all created equal. They are differentiated by the chemistries used in the battery’s cathode. There are about a half dozen li-ion chemistries, each with their own subcategories and their own advantages and disadvantages.

In 2017, lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) and LFP batteries had about an 80% share of the global li-ion market. LCO is used mainly in smartphones and computers.

Since 2015, NMC chemistry has become widely used in electric vehicle (EV) applications. NMC chemistry has also been used in stationary storage markets, and the combined demand from those uses is outstripping supply.

“There aren’t enough cell manufacturing plants operational today, and the all of the current production capacity has already been contracted,” Gupta said. As a result, lead times for battery availability for energy storage applications have increased.

It is a different story for LFP batteries, however. Typically used in power tools and industrial applications, they have been used more widely in electric buses since 2015.

“There is availability of LFP batteries today, largely coming from Chinese vendors, where these batteries have traditionally been used in e-buses and e-trucks,” Gupta said.

Gupta expects the NMC shortage issues to be resolved as battery manufacturers ramp up production and new cell manufacturing plants come online over the next fe
w quarters. Then, she said, battery price will continue to decline as vendors achieve economies of scale.

In the meantime, LFP manufacturing capacity will grow, pushing down prices even as lead times for NMC battery availability stretch out to six or even nine months. That will lead to an increased interest in LFP batteries for use in energy applications for in front-of-the-meter storage projects, Gupta said.

China rising

The most immediate consequence of this shift in battery chemistry is that Chinese companies are attracting interest from U.S. storage vendors, Gupta said.

Until recently, Chinese battery maker BYD was the biggest LFP manufacturer supplying batteries for front-of-the-meter storage projects as well as electric buses, but now system integrators are looking at several Chinese vendors to secure LFP batteries.

Historically, most li-ion battery cells were made in Japan or South Korea by manufacturing giants such as Panasonic or LG Chem. Now, Chinese vendors are competing head on with those manufactures both in terms of products and state of the art manufacturing facilities.

In 2017, China launched its first national energy storage policy. In the first half of 2018, China announced new energy storage projects totaling 340 MW, which is nearly equal to the country’s existing energy storage capacity of 389 MW at the end of 2017, according to the China Energy Storage Alliance.

The country is also dramatically ramping up its battery manufacturing capability. China has set a target of having the capacity to produce 121 GWh of batteries by 2020, according to Bloomberg. That compares with a target of 35 GWh for Tesla’s gigafactory when it reaches full capacity next year.

China’s BYD is already the leading manufacturer of EVs in the world, and the country is setting up Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) to be a leading battery manufacturer with plans to quintuple CATL’s production capacity, putting it ahead of both Tesla and BYD.

Chinese companies are increasing both the NMC and LFP capacity but most of the emphasis is on LFP, according to GCIS China Strategic Research.

One of the vendors looking to China for batteries is Powin Energy.

Powin once was both a developer of energy storage projects and an equipment provider. Late last year, the Oregon company sold over 110 MWh of energy storage projects it had developed to esVolta, completing its transition from the project development company to an energy storage systems and services provider. Powin will be esVolta’s exclusive provider of energy storage systems through 2022.

With its new corporate focus, Powin says it is on track to install or deliver over 32.8 MW / 70MWh of energy storage projects by early 2019. Longer term, the company has contracts to deliver an additional 94.7 MW / 411 MWh of project between late 2019 and late 2021.

Those projects, which all use LFP chemistry, give Powin momentum going into 2019 while competitors continue to face critical material shortages, Geoff Brown, the company’s president, told Utility Dive.

“We are benefiting from the redirection of the NMC batteries to a higher margin market, creating the appearance of a shortage on our side,” Brown said.

Some of the large NMC manufacturers are pursuing markets where they can command higher margins, markets that are willing to pay a premium for higher performance such as energy density and battery life, Brown said. NMC batteries typically have a higher energy density than LFP batteries, but energy density is not as big a concern for stationary storage.

Brown said he sees a lot more developers looking at LFP batteries and going directly to Chinese companies. But that is a flexibility that some manufacturers do not have.

“They have to sell what they are manufacturing,” he said.

The ‘rugged’ approach

Brown said he is willing to take the trade off of energy density for the more “rugged” characteristics of LFP batteries: their ability to operate with a deeper discharge cycle and to withstand higher levels of sustained voltage.

NMC chemistry is particularly sensitive to being fully discharged on a regular basis.

“If you do that too often you will violate your warranty,” Brown said. LFP, on the other hand, is much more resistant to a full depth of discharge cycle, so typically you have more cycle life, he said.

A storage facility that is serving the peak power market is looking at cycling 50 or 60 times a year. That is quite different from the frequency regulation market or the market for solar shifting where a battery could be subject to a full cycle every day, Brown said.

“Some of the most exciting applications for stationary storage are not high cycling; they are peaking applications.”

However, Brown insists “there is no one best chemistry.”

Brown said the main reason Powin uses LFP batteries is safety. LFP batteries are generally more thermally resistant than NMC batteries. And “because you trust it, you can reduce your costs in other elements” such as thermal controls and safeguards.

“We decided that with the size of our business, we would take a conservative, rugged approach,” Brown said. Choice of technology is a function of market price and use case, and “those two things are different for EVs and energy storage and different for different stationary storage applications.”

For now, Brown says, he believes “LFP is the right approach,” though, he says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if in 18 months we had an NMC offering.”

“The perfect energy storage system hasn’t been built yet,” Brown said. “If we keep reducing costs, developers will find a way to get that to the market.”

University of Birmingham scientists are paving the way to swap the lithium in lithium-ion batteries with sodium, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) are rechargeable and are widely used in laptops, mobile phones and in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. The electric vehicle is a crucial technology for fighting pollution in cities and realising an era of clean sustainable transport.

However lithium is expensive and resources are unevenly distributed across the planet. Large amounts of drinking water are used in lithium extraction and extraction techniques are becoming more energy intensive as lithium demand rises – an ‘own goal’ in terms of sustainability.

With the ever increasing demand for electric cars, the need for reliable rechargeable batteries is rising dramatically, so there is keen interest in finding a charge carrier other than lithium that is cheap and easily accessible.

Sodium is inexpensive and can be found in seawater so is virtually limitless. However, sodium is a larger ion than lithium, so it is not possible to simply “swap” it for lithium in current technologies. For example, unlike lithium, sodium will not fit between the carbon layers of the ubiquitous LIB anode, graphite.

The scientists needed to find new materials to act as battery components for sodium-ion batteries that will compete with lithium for capacity, speed of charge, energy and power density.

Running quantum mechanical models on supercomputers, Dr. Andrew Morris’s team from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Metallurgy and Materials was able to predict what happens when sodium is inserted into phosphorus.

In collaboration with Dr. Lauren Marbella and Professor Clare Grey’s team at the University of Cambridge, who performed the experiments which have verified the predictions, they found that the phosphorus forms helices at intermediate stages of charging.

The researchers identified the final composition of the electrode, which provides a final capacity of charge carriers seven times that of graphite for the same weight. This gives us fresh insights into how to make high-capacity sodium-ion anodes.

Dr. Andrew Morris said: “This is a huge win for computational materials science. We predicted how phosphorus would behave as an electrode in 2016 and were now able, with Professor Grey’s team to provide insights into experiment and learn how to make our predictions better. It’s amazing how powerful combined theory-experimental approaches are.”

Spanish renewable energy developer Acciona Energy says it intends to add battery storage to the Mortlake South wind farm following its win at the Victorian government’s renewable energy auction this week.

Acciona will begin construction of the 157.5MW wind farm early next year, completing it in 2020 with the addition of between 5MW and 7MW of battery storage – although it has yet to decide the length of the storage.

Brett Wickham, head of Acciona Energy Australian operations, says the battery storage installation will be seen as a trial, to test its capabilities in storing excess output, time shifting output, and providing network services as well as fast frequency response and frequency control.

“We want to put it in to model and test what batteries are going to do in future, so we understand the bidding model for batteries, and how we might use them for network support, fast frequency response, FCAS etc,” Wickham told RenewEconomy.

“All our future (wind and solar) projects will have capabilities for batteries. You and I both know, Giles, that batteries will be on every site, and in the future renewables will be fully dispatchable.”

Mortlake South will be the second wind farm in Victoria to have battery storage attached to the project (after Bulgana renewables hub), while four wind farms in South Australia (Hornsdale, Lincoln Gap, Snowtown, and Wattle Point) have or are building battery storage – as is the Kennedy energy hub in Queensland.

Acciona Energy was one of six winners of the Victoria auction, which resulted in 928MW of capacity being awarded rather than the 650MW forecast when the auction was first announced last year. That’s because of the excellent value of the proposals.

Wickham declined to comment on his company’s bid price into the auction – the largest ever held in Australia – but said it was a smart piece of work by the government because it limited its financial exposure.

The auction pricing was made up of three elements – a contract for difference set at $56/MWh for wind, plus a “base” price (any extra the wind farm may need to make ends meet), plus a “contract cap”, which would limit the exposure of the Victorian government if wholesale prices fell consistently below the strike price of wind ($56/MWh).

Because wind farms can make plenty of money at around $56/MWh, it is assumed that the base price was not triggered by any of the winning projects, (although some may have bid negative) and the competition between projects came in the size of the contract cap.

That means that if wholesale electricity prices did fall below $56/MWh for an extended period – they are currently more than $90/MWh – not only would consumers be celebrating, but the Victorian government would be limited in its exposure.

If wholesale electricity prices stay above $56/MWh, then the wind and solar farms will give the extra revenue back to the government.

“It was a hell of a thing to work our modeling, but it was a really smart,” Wickham told RenewEconomy. “We assume that the only base payments paid were for solar.”

Acciona also operates the 132MW Mt Gellibrand wind farm, which is currently in the commissioning phase, and the 192MW Waubra wind farm in Victoria. It also has the 64MW Cathedral Rocks wind farm in South Australia and the 46.5MW Gunning wind farm in NSW.

Up to 140MW of capacity will be procured under the first ever tender for Ireland’s new frequency response and balancing programme, with projects to go live by September 2021.

The DS3 programme was established in 2011 to meet the challenges of operating the electricity system in a safe, secure and efficient manner while Ireland seeks to increase its renewable energy capacity.

Ireland’s transmission system operator (TSO) Eirgrid, alongside that of Northern Ireland SONI, has today released details of the first procurement exercise to be carried out under DS3, which will begin in February 2019 following a contracts consultation starting in October 2018.

When contracts are awarded in 1 September next year, the TSOs will procure between 91-140MW of projects which will be required to go live by 1 September 2021.

The contracts will offer a fixed term of six years as set by the decision making authority for the Single Electricity Market (SEM). The document stipulates that applicants must provide a valid legally binding connection agreement, or be in receipt of a connection offer, that ‘will end no later than 1 September 2027’.

Projects up to 50MW will be awarded a contract, higher than the 30MW suggested by the TSOs after the SEM Committee overruled the recommendation. They will have to deliver a ‘bundle’ of services rather than individual contracts being awarded across different requirements, all to the same contracted volume length.

The DS3 services will range from fast frequency response (FFR), requiring capacity delivery between 0.1 and 10 seconds, up to Tertiary Operating Reserve 2 (TOR2) requiring delivery of up to 20 minutes.

On top of these duration periods, a required minimum speed of response of 150-300 milliseconds will be required. While Eirgrid has not stipulated that only battery projects can apply to deliver DS3, only projects meeting these requirements will be accepted which are essentially only battery or hydrid storage systems.

Lithium ion batteries power everything from cell phones and laptops to electric vehicles (EVs) and backup systems for power grids. The lithium used in these batteries comes from two sources: hard rock mining of the mineral spodumene in Canada, Australia, and China, or from solar evaporation of brines extracted from aquifers below salt flats or Salars. The brines contain about 58 percent of the world’s lithium sources and are located primarily in North and South America and Asia.

Now, a company called Lilac Solutions—a startup from Northwestern University—has devised a third way of producing lithium. The company, which was formed in 2016, has developed ion-exchange materials that can be used to extract lithium directly from brines. This process promises to save huge amounts of processing time and may prove to be more environmentally friendly.

Salt brine deposits tend to form in arid areas. They are created in a closed basin containing a salt lake or salt flat. The climate must be dry enough so that surface waters can flow into the basin, but do not flow out. The inflow brings dissolved calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and lithium from the surrounding area into the basin. If the lake dries out completely, it can leave a salt flat covered by evaporated minerals—rock salt being the best known of these.

As the water evaporates, lithium acts differently than the other dissolved minerals. Because it is more soluble, lithium remains in solution. It becomes concentrated as it sinks into the underlying aquifer brine, which can be up to several hundred meters below the salt surface.

To extract lithium with the traditional method, the brine is pumped to the surface and placed in shallow evaporation ponds. It can take two to three years of pumping the brine from one evaporation pond to another to the point where the lithium is enriched to as high as 5,000 ppm (about 0.5%). When it reaches this concentration, it is pumped to a chemical plant, where lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide are produced.

Problems

Processing the brine has three major problems. Only about 50% of the lithium available is extracted during the processing of the concentrate salt solution. Time is also a factor. Two to three years is a long time to wait and the pricing of lithium is quite volatile, making it difficult to predict future profits. Lastly, the variability of the weather can greatly influence the ability of the solar ponds to evaporate the brine solution. Such was recently the case with an Argentinian lithium producer that reported lower lithium production than expected because the local weather interfered with the evaporation of its brine ponds.

Solution

The lithium extraction method developed by Lilac Solutions was developed in an effort to solve these problems. The system pumps brine from the aquifer directly into a tank that contains the specialized ion exchange materials. As the brine passes through the material, lithium ions are released from the brine and filtered out by the ion-exchange material. The remaining salt solution can be drained directly back into the salt brine basin. There is no need for evaporation ponds and the process takes hours instead of years. In addition, approximately 80% of the available lithium can be removed from the brine using ion-exchange materials. The process only removes lithium from the brine and, unlike the evaporation process, does not produce the large piles of waste salt materials that result from conventional brine evaporation.

The process was the brain-child of Dave Snydacker, who was a Ph.D. student in Christopher Wolverton’s research group at Northwestern University. According to a news release by Northwestern University, Snydacker was studying lithium ion batteries when he became interested in the sources for lithium raw materials. After doing some research, he began to think of the problem in a new way. “In my research to answer these questions, I uncovered mostly good news about the future of lithium, but I also uncovered a big opportunity. New extraction technologies are needed to ramp up supply,” said Snydacker, who is now chief technical officer of Lilac Solutions.

Using an Open Quantum Materials Database that was previously developed by Professor Wolverton, Snydacker identified 13 potential new materials that could act as a lithium ion exchange medium. The company Lilac Solutions was founded by Snydacker to develop these potential materials and to find which candidates could, “…extract lithium faster, at a higher concentration, and with a much smaller carbon footprint.”

Lilac Solutions won $15,000 at the 2016 Northwestern University Venture Challenge and, in 2017, was awarded a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the Department of Energy (DoE). Two of the materials from the Open Quantum Materials database have already been tested to prove the concept, while plans are in place to test the remaining 11 materials to determine the best solution. Lilac’s hope is to build partnerships, providing its technology to brine developers and operators around the world.