Lithium News

Goal Zero is another company that offers the power station type of solutions, and the company does this with several devices of different, sizes, capacities and features. The Goal Zero Sherpa 100AC Power Pack is one of their most recent products. It is a portable power pack with a capacity of 25,600mAh or 94.7Wh, and it is powered by Lithium-Ion NMC cells.

According to Goal Zero, “the Sherpa 100AC features an interactive OLED screen that displays power in/out alerts for individual ports, battery level, and gives the consumer the ability to customize their charging and recharging options”. They claim that it will power/charge a laptop twice, a tablet 4 times and a Smartphone 8 times. It includes a 100W AC port, 2 USB-C power delivery ports that offer 60W each, and its surface provides wireless charging.

It can be recharged in 3 hours via the wall charger or 2.5 hours via USB-C PD. The power station weighs only 2 lbs, and the company provides all of the necessary charging cables including a lightning cable, micro USB, USB-C and USB-C to USB-C cables.

The Goal Zero Sherpa 100AC Power Pack will be available in September 2018 for $299.99. You will be able to purchase one at GoalZero.com, Amazon.com, or select retailers.

For more information and to learn more about portable power solutions, you can head over to the Goal Zero website.

Tesla gets more attention for its electric vehicles, but Nissan and Renault continue to sell their fully capable EVs to a whole bunch of people in Europe. The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance released its European EV sales numbers for the first half of 2018 today, and it sure has something to crow about.

For example, the Nissan Leaf has sold over 47,000 units so far this year, making it the best-selling EV on the continent in 2018. Behind the Leaf, the Renault Zoe and Kangoo Z.E. all-electric vehicles together made up 21.9 percent of all the electric vehicles sold in Europe this year. Back in April, the Leaf and the Zoe were the two best-selling EVs in Europe. The Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In Hybrid, meanwhile, was the market leader for PHEV SUVs, which is cool, but that isn’t exactly an automotive segment bursting with competitors. The Outlander PHEV was fourth, by the way, in the overall plug-in vehicle market, back in April.

Overall, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi says that all vehicle sales among its member companies were 5.1 percent higher year-to-date in 2018 than the first six months of 2017.

Even with all of this good news for Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, the situation for EVs in Europe is not simply smooth sailing. German utility lobby BDEW, for example, has installed a record number of EV charging stations, but the utilities that mostly run these stations cannot make money from them.

The problem, BDEW said, is the auto companies. “If electric mobility is to achieve a breakthrough in Germany in the next few years, then the car industry has to offer models to the market that can compete on price and performance with the combustion engine,” BDEW managing director Stefan Kapferer told Reuters.

Following the isolation of graphene in 2004, a race began to synthesize new two-dimensional materials. These are single-layer substances with a thickness of between one atom and a few nanometers (billionths of a meter). They have unique properties linked to their reduced dimensionality and play a key role in the development of nanotechnology and nanoengineering.

An international group of researchers, including Brazilian scientists affiliated with the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), have succeeded in producing a new material with these characteristics.

The researchers extracted a 2-D material they call hematene from ordinary iron ore. The material is only three atoms thick and is thought to have enhanced photocatalytic properties. This innovation is described in an article published in Nature Nanotechnology.

“The material we synthesized can act as a photocatalyst to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, so that electricity can be generated from hydrogen, among several other potential applications,” said Douglas Soares Galvão, one of the authors of the study and co-principal investigator at CCES.

The new material was exfoliated from hematite, one of the most common minerals on Earth and the main source of iron, which is the cheapest metal, used in many products and above all to make steel.

Unlike carbon and its 2-D form graphene, hematite is a non-van der Waals material, meaning it is held together by 3-D bonding networks rather than by nonchemical and comparatively weaker atomic van der Waals interactions, which are noncovalent (they do not involve the sharing of one or more pairs of electrons by the atoms that participate in the bond).

Because it is a naturally occurring mineral, has highly oriented, large crystals and is a non-van der Waals material, the researchers believe that hematite is an excellent precursor for the exfoliation of novel 2-D materials.

“Most of the 2-D materials synthesized to date were derived from samples of van der Waals solids. Non-van der Waals 2-D materials with highly ordered atomic layers and large grains are still rare,” Galvão said.

Hematene was synthesized by the liquid-phase exfoliation of hematite ore in an organic solvent, N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF). Transmission electron microscopy confirmed the exfoliation and formation of hematene in single sheets with a thickness of only three iron and oxygen atoms (monolayer) and in randomly stacked bilayer sheets.

Tests and mathematical calculations were performed to study the magnetic properties of hematene. The results showed that they differed from the magnetic properties of hematite. While native hematite is antiferromagnetic, hematene is ferromagnetic, like a common magnet. In ferromagnets, the dipoles are parallel and aligned in the same direction. In antiferromagnets, the dipoles are antiparallel and aligned in opposite directions.

“In ferromagnets, the atoms’ magnetic moments point in the same direction. In antiferromagnets, the moments in adjacent atoms alternate,” Galvão explained.

Efficient photocatalyst

The researchers also analyzed hematene’s photocatalytic properties—its capacity to increase the speed of a chemical reaction when energized by light. The results showed that photocatalysis by hematene is more efficient than photocatalysis by hematite, whose photocatalytic properties are well-known but not strong enough to be useful.

For a material to be an efficient photocatalyst, it must absorb the visible part of sunlight, generate an electrical charge, and transport it to the surface of the material to carry out the desired reaction.

Hematite absorbs sunlight from the ultraviolet to the yellow-orange region, but the charge it produces is very short-lived. As a result, it fades before reaching the surface.

Hematene photocatalysis is more efficient because photons generate both negative and positive charges within a few atoms of the surface, the researchers said. By pairing the new material with titanium dioxide nanotube arrays, which provide an easy pathway for electrons to leave the hematene, the scientists found they could allow more visible light to be absorbed.

“Hematene may be an efficient photocatalyst, especially for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, and could also serve as an ultrathin magnetic material for spintronic-based devices,” said the FAPESP RIDC researcher. Spintronics (or magnetoelectronics) is a new technology used to store, display and process information based on changes brought about by an electron’s spin, which is directly coupled to its magnetic moment.

The group have investigated other non-van der Waals materials for their potential to give rise to other 2-D materials with exotic properties. “There are a number of other iron oxides and derivatives thereof that are candidates for originating new 2-D materials,” Galvão said.

Battery recycling is expected to become an increasingly significant part of the electric vehicle supply chain in the near future.

In order to prepare for it, China is launching an electric car battery recycling standard as old batteries are expected to come back in high numbers as EV adoption ramps up in the country.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has already pushed a standard for tracking the entire life cycle of batteries in electric vehicles, but it is now establishing a new scheme with automakers to recycle the batteries at the end of life.

Reuters reported:

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a notice published on its website late on Wednesday the cities and regions would encourage car producers to establish recycling service outlets and cooperate with battery producers, used car dealers and scrap merchants to build regional recycling systems.

It said the entire industrial chain needed to be fully mobilized in order to ensure that EV batteries were recovered. It would strictly control the number of new enterprises involved in battery recycling and make full use of existing recycling bases in China in order to promote sustainable development in sector.”

Electric vehicle adoption in China is growing fast, but it is still fairly new. The number of battery packs at their end of life will remain relatively low in the next few years, but it will change rapidly once vehicles produced today will need new packs.

China produced over 400,000 electric cars during the first half of the year and it plans to ramp up to 2 million EVs per year in the next two years through their ZEV mandate.

 

Fluctuating solar and wind power require lots of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries seem like the obvious choice—but they are far too expensive to play a major role.

A pair of 500-foot smokestacks rise from a natural-gas power plant on the harbor of Moss Landing, California, casting an industrial pall over the pretty seaside town.

If state regulators sign off, however, it could be the site of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery project by late 2020, helping to balance fluctuating wind and solar energy on the California grid.

The 300-megawatt facility is one of four giant lithium-ion storage projects that Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, asked the California Public Utilities Commission to approve in late June. Collectively, they would add enough storage capacity to the grid to supply about 2,700 homes for a month (or to store about .0009 percent of the electricity the state uses each year).

The California projects are among a growing number of efforts around the world, including Tesla’s 100-megawatt battery array in South Australia, to build ever larger lithium-ion storage systems as prices decline and renewable generation increases. They’re fueling growing optimism that these giant batteries will allow wind and solar power to displace a growing share of fossil-fuel plants.

But there’s a problem with this rosy scenario. These batteries are far too expensive and don’t last nearly long enough, limiting the role they can play on the grid, experts say. If we plan to rely on them for massive amounts of storage as more renewables come online—rather than turning to a broader mix of low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture technology—we could be headed down a dangerously unaffordable path.

Small doses

Today’s battery storage technology works best in a limited role, as a substitute for “peaking” power plants, according to a 2016 analysis by researchers at MIT and Argonne National Lab. These are smaller facilities, frequently fueled by natural gas today, that can afford to operate infrequently, firing up quickly when prices and demand are high.

Lithium-ion batteries could compete economically with these natural-gas peakers within the next five years, says Marco Ferrara, a cofounder of Form Energy, an MIT spinout developing grid storage batteries.

“The gas peaker business is pretty close to ending, and lithium-ion is a great replacement,” he says.

This peaker role is precisely the one that most of the new and forthcoming lithium-ion battery projects are designed to fill. Indeed, the California storage projects could eventually replace three natural-gas facilities in the region, two of which are peaker plants.

But much beyond this role, batteries run into real problems. The authors of the 2016 study found steeply diminishing returns when a lot of battery storage is added to the grid. They concluded that coupling battery storage with renewable plants is a “weak substitute” for large, flexible coal or natural-gas combined-cycle plants, the type that can be tapped at any time, run continuously, and vary output levels to meet shifting demand throughout the day.

Not only is lithium-ion technology too expensive for this role, but limited battery life means it’s not well suited to filling gaps during the days, weeks, and even months when wind and solar generation flags.

This problem is particularly acute in California, where both wind and solar fall off precipitously during the fall and winter months. Here’s what the seasonal pattern looks like:

This leads to a critical problem: when renewables reach high levels on the grid, you need far, far more wind and solar plants to crank out enough excess power during peak times to keep the grid operating through those long seasonal dips, says Jesse Jenkins, a coauthor of the study and an energy systems researcher. That, in turn, requires banks upon banks of batteries that can store it all away until it’s needed.

And that ends up being astronomically expensive.

California dreaming

There are issues California can’t afford to ignore for long. The state is already on track to get 50 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2020, and the legislature is once again considering a bill that would require it to reach 100 percent by 2045. To complicate things, regulators voted in January to close the state’s last nuclear plant, a carbon-free source that provides 24 percent of PG&E’s energy. That will leave California heavily reliant on renewable sources to meet its goals.

The Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy policy think tank, recently found that reaching the 80 percent mark for renewables in California would mean massive amounts of surplus generation during the summer months, requiring 9.6 million megawatt-hours of energy storage. Achieving 100 percent would require 36.3 million.

The state currently has 150,000 megawatt-hours of energy storage in total. (That’s mainly pumped hydroelectric storage, with a small share of batteries.)

Building the level of renewable generation and storage necessary to reach the state’s goals would drive up costs exponentially, from $49 per megawatt-hour of generation at 50 percent to $1,612 at 100 percent.

And that’s assuming lithium-ion batteries will cost roughly a third what they do now.

“The system becomes completely dominated by the cost of storage,” says Steve Brick, a senior advisor for the Clean Air Task Force. “You build this enormous storage machine that you fill up by midyear and then just dissipate it. It’s a massive capital investment that gets utilized very little.”

These forces would dramatically increase electricity costs for consumers.

“You have to pause and ask yourself: ‘Is there any way the public would stand for that?’” Brick says.

Similarly, a study earlier this year in Energy & Environmental Science found that meeting 80 percent of US electricity demand with wind and solar would require either a nationwide high-speed transmission system, which can balance renewable generation over hundreds of miles, or 12 hours of electricity storage for the whole system (see “Relying on renewables alone significantly inflates the cost of overhauling energy”).

At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.

A scary price tag

Of course, cheaper and better grid storage is possible, and researchers and startups are exploring various possibilities. Form Energy, which recently secured funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is trying to develop aqueous sulfur flow batteries with far longer duration, at a fifth the cost where lithium-ion batteries are likely to land.

Ferrara’s modeling has found that such a battery could make it possible for renewables to provide 90 percent of electricity needs for most grids, for just marginally higher costs than today’s.

But it’s dangerous to bank on those kinds of battery breakthroughs—and even if Form Energy or some other company does pull it off, costs would still rise exponentially beyond the 90 percent threshold, Ferrara says.

“The risk,” Jenkins says, “is we drive up the cost of deep decarbonization in the power sector to the point where the public decides it’s simply unaffordable to continue toward zero carbon.”