Lithium News

Luxury vehicle maker BMW won’t be signing any supply contracts for lithium and cobalt at least until 2020, when mass-producing electric vehicles (EVs) proves to be profitable, chief executive Harald Krueger said.

The German company, which unveiled its first battery electric car in 2013, and is said to be ready to unveil a new wave of EVs later this year, told analysts in Munich it will wait until the technology it uses is profitable enough before scaling up for volume production.

BMW’s upcoming i8 Roadster has its fourth-generation electric drive technology, which according to the company touts a 40% range increase over the previous version.

“We wanted to wait for the fifth generation to be much more cost competitive,” Krueger, said, adding his company does not want to scale up with the fourth-generation. BMW is now working on the sixth-generation of its technology has is investing a three-digit-million euro amount particularly in battery cell research for the purposes of mass production.

Last month, the automaker said it was close to signing a 10-year supply contract for lithium and cobalt, according to a report in local paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Markus Duesmann, purchasing executive for the German marque, said at the time the aim was to secure the supply all the way down to the level of the mine, adding the contracts were “ready to be signed.”

The company believes its needs for car-battery raw materials will grow 10-fold by 2025, when it plans to offer 25 electrified vehicles. Those cars, like many of the ones produced by BMW’s peers will privilege the use of nickel-magnesium-cobalt batteries (EV pioneer Tesla’s favoured battery technology uses less cobalt).

The University of Connecticut has signed a three-year research agreement with a Fairfield County company that is developing high-capacity lithium-ion batteries for such uses as giving electric vehicles greater range between charges and energy storage for use at a later time.

The value of the research agreement with Wilton-based Cadenza Innovation is $700,000, according to UConn officials. The work UConn scientists will be doing for Cadenza involves highly specialized materials analysis and synthesis for use in lithium-ion-based energy storage.

Cadenza has developed a way of packaging lithium-ion batteries that increases the amount of energy the batteries can produce.

The work UConn will be doing is being conducted at UConn’s Center for Clean Energy Engineering in the lab of Dr. Radenka Maric, the school’s vice president for research and Connecticut Clean Energy Fund Professor of Sustainable Energy, who is the principal investigator on the project. Additional work will take place at the recently opened Innovation Partnership Building at the UConn Tech Park by professors Sina Shahbazmohamadi and Steven Suib.

“Cadenza has the technical capability and holds key patents to develop game-changing battery technologies,” Maric said in a statement. “UConn has the expertise and unmatched research facilities to conduct rigorous, reproducible, accurate specialty materials analysis to help their technology advance.”

Cadenza was founded in 2012 by Christina Lampe-Onnerud, a leading entrepreneur in the field of energy storage. The company, which currently employs 25 people, had been located in Oxford before moving about a year ago into a space in Bethel that also houses the research laboratories of commercial battery maker Duracell.

The company’s corporate offices are in Wilton. Cadenza’s investors include Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public technology investment arm.

Lampe-Onnerud said the work UConn’s scientists are doing is “vital research for energy storage and a range of other critical technologies.”

“They have developed some really important analytical capabilities over years,” she said of the UConn researchers

The UConn research is designed to build upon Cadenza’s partnership with Syrah Resources, the only major, fully funded, natural graphite development project in construction globally. Syrah is projected to be the world’s largest individual graphite producer by 2020 with approximately 40 percent market share from its operation in Mozambique.

The work UConn’s scientists are doing involves the characterization and fundamental study of Cadenza Innovation’s technology to synthesize low cost, natural graphite collected from the Syrah mines into an ideal base material for lithium-ion batteries. As the research proceeds, studies focused on improving battery performance will be done.

Researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago and at Argonne National Laboratory have designed a new lithium-air battery that works in a natural-air environment and still functioned after a record-breaking 750 charge/discharge cycles. Their findings are reported in the journal Nature.

“Our lithium-air battery design represents a revolution in the battery community,” said Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and co-corresponding author of the paper. “This first demonstration of a true lithium-air battery is an important step toward what we call ‘beyond lithium-ion’ batteries, but we have more work to do in order to commercialize it.”

Lithium-air batteries — believed to be able to hold up to five times more energy than the lithium-ion batteries that power our phones, laptops and electric vehicles — have been tantalizing to battery researchers for years. But several obstacles have plagued their development, science Daily reported quoting from the research paper.

The batteries would work by combining lithium present in the anode with oxygen from the air to produce lithium peroxide on the cathode during the discharge phase. The lithium peroxide would be broken back down into its lithium and oxygen components during the charge phase.

“A few others have tried to build lithium-air battery cells, but they failed because of poor cycle life,” said Larry Curtiss, co-principal author and Argonne Distinguished Fellow.

The UIC-Argonne research team overcame these challenges by using a unique combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte — the three main components of any battery — to prevent anode oxidation and buildup of battery-killing byproducts on the cathode and allow the battery to operate in a natural-air environment.

They coated the lithium anode with a thin layer of lithium carbonate that selectively allows lithium ions from the anode to enter the electrolyte while preventing unwanted compounds from reaching the anode.

In a lithium-air battery, the cathode is simply where the air enters the battery. In experimental designs of lithium-air batteries, oxygen, together with all the other gases that make up air, enters the electrolyte through a carbon-based spongy lattice structure.

Salehi-Khojin and his colleagues coated the lattice structure with a molybdenum disulfate catalyst and used a unique hybrid electrolyte made of ionic liquid and dimethyl sulfoxide, a common component of battery electrolytes, that helped facilitate lithium-oxygen reactions, minimize lithium reactions with other elements in the air and boost efficiency of the battery.

“The complete architectural overhaul we performed on this battery by redesigning every part of it, helped us enable the reactions we wanted to occur and prevent or block those that would ultimately cause the battery to go dead,” said Salehi-Khojin.

The US Department of Energy recently floated the idea of carving out a place for small coal power plants in the distributed energy landscape of the future, but it looks like the agency’s latest attempt to save coal is a day late and a dollar short. In the latest development, GE has just begun pitching a new energy storage project with the evocative name The Reservoir, and it puts the prospect of a coal powered future where it belongs: on the shelf.

Last week CleanTechnica grabbed a few minutes on the phone with Eric Gebhardt, GE’s Vice President and Strategic Technology Officer, to get some insights into the Reservoir, and he had something to say that will bring little comfort to coal fans.

So, What Is The Reservoir?

When GE announced The Reservoir, it made the implications for renewable energy abundantly clear. GE described the new energy storage project as a “comprehensive” platform that “delivers a suite of customized storage solutions to help customers address new challenges and seek new opportunities in a rapidly transforming power grid that is becoming more highly diversified and distributed.”

That’s kind of a mouthful. What it means in practice is a lesson that grid planners have already absorbed: the old model of large scale, centralized energy generation is, well, old.  The rise of digital technology, renewable energy, and distributed energy have resulted in a “paradigm shift” in energy generation and distribution.

Gebhardt’s statement in a press release for The Reservoir is definitive on that score:

GE’s Reservoir platform enables cost-effective distribution, storage, and utilization of cleaner, more reliable power where and when it is needed most. It can fit into most any setting, from centralized grid systems to the most remote villages and communities. The Reservoir also allows energy providers new degrees of flexibility for more intelligently managing and getting the most out of all their power assets.

That sounds pretty fancy, right? The innards consist of a fairly standard lithium-ion energy storage arrangement of 1.2 megawatts and 4 megawatt-hours, but all the system control and operation overlays are exclusive to GE. The “reservoir” name evokes energy storage but it could just as easily refer to the storehouse of knowledge GE brings to the design. Here’s another snippet from the press release:

…It is a modular solution that integrates GE’s Battery Blade design (module stack design) with key technologies from across the company’s portfolio to achieve an industry-leading energy density, footprint and lifetime performance. GE’s proprietary Blade Protection Unit (BPU) actively balances the safety, life, and production of each battery Blade, extending battery life by up to 15 % and reducing fault currents by up to 5X.

[snip]

GE’s Reservoir platform leverages Predix and Edge controls technologies to provide data-driven insights that help energy operators enhance their systems. These digital technologies leverage GE’s unique and unparalleled technical and industry domain knowledge across the entire energy ecosystem from generation to consumption.

A Deeper Dive Into The Reservoir

In our phone conversation, Gebhardt emphasized the modular, factory-built, turnkey aspect of The Reservoir:

Reservoir is 1.2 MW modular building block, which we’ll build out for customers. The battery is lithium-ion, but everything beyond that is engineered by GE: stacking, interfacing, power electronics, etc.

We build it in a controlled environment in factory, then ship it. Roll out cable and plug it in, and it’s ready to go.

That doesn’t leave much room for small modular coal power plants, does it?

The Reservoir also leverages silicon carbide technology to boost the efficiency of solar farms, cut down on installation time and reduce lifcycle costs:

…the way we interface the DC-couple, we can have up to 5% more efficiency. We can also manage the cell to have 15% longer lifecycle, and significantly reduce installation time.

To gain 5% increase in efficiency for solar farms, with DC power the typical way to connect is to AC, then connect from AC back to DC and charge the battery. The new Reservoir connects DC directly to DC, so when you add silicon carbide that means 5%.

It means a lot for 100 megawatt solar farm. 5% is a lot, plus you’re charging and discharging every day so it does build up over time.

Gebhardt also foresees grid planners using The Reservoir to smooth out load bottlenecks without the need for expensive new substations:

…so for example if you have a substation reaching capacity, you could put this system downstream. Peak times only happen a few times a year, so you don’t need a new substation or substation upgrade.

Overall, the goal when we look at energy ecosystem is how do we develop technology that makes the overall grid more productive and lowers cost, lowers carbon emissions, and provides for higher resiliency.

If you look at being able to being able to put [energy storage] into wind turbines, making sure to stabilize grid, allowing more renewables to come in, and you can use it with solar to absorb power in middle of the day.

So for peak congestion or constraining, it can help where you’re running out of the ability to run power through certain substations.

States are starting to look at non-wire solutions for substation and transmission line projects, and some states require these alternative to be part of the review process.

At the close of our conversation, Gebhardt made it clear that GE is responding to the demands of the marketplace:

The higher efficiency, longer lifecycle, lower installation time, modular solution, stack like LEGO blocks: customers are asking for this.

Again, not much room for coal power plants in that equation, small or not.

GE already has a customer lined up for its new energy storage product, but the company is not ready to name names just yet, so stay tuned for more on that.

Energy Storage Vs. Coal

Speaking of that idea about building fleets of small coal power plants, as of this writing the Department of Energy has not yet issued a formal request for proposals, so who knows if this idea will ever get off the ground.

Steve Winberg, the agency’s assistant secretary for fossil energy, floated the idea at a conference last week with this insightful statement reported by Axios:

“If we’re successful with these small modular coal plants … that could be a paradigm shift.”

Well, good luck with that. Winberg’s responsibilities at the Energy Department include natural gas R&D, and gas stakeholders have been talking up the role of natural gas in facilitating more renewable energy in the grid. Gas already has a head start pushing coal off the grid and it’s unlikely that a new R&D program will make any meaningful difference.

For that matter, the window for natural gas is already beginning to close. In some markets where coal power plants are closing, renewable energy is scooting in to fill the gap. That includes repurposing coal power plants for solar farms.

In another ominous sign for coal, a new GTM Research report is looking at a tripling of energy storage capacity in the US, as costs fall and state-level support grows

Rolls-Royce, the engineering giant, is joining the race to build the next generation of energy storage “batteries” using the same material originally designed for hard-wearing contact lenses.

The FTSE 100 group said it will work with Superdielectrics, a research company, to use the material to challenge the dominance of traditional batteries.

Early studies with the universities of Surrey and Bristol have shown that the new polymer can create a capacitor, or energy storage, which is between 1,000 to 10,000 times more effective than existing materials. This “supercapacitor” could provide the bridge between systems which are quick to charge and quick to release small amounts of energy and those, such as lithium-ion batteries, which are slow to charge but last longer. It could allow electric vehicles, for example, to charge up fully within a few minutes and last as long as today’s electric cars.

Dave Smith, Rolls-Royce technology boss, said: “We believe that electrification will play an increasingly important role in many of our markets over the coming years and by working with partners on potential new technologies for energy storage we can ensure that Rolls-Royce is well positioned to take advantage of new developments,” he said.

The deal, to be announced today, comes just weeks after Warren East, the Rolls-Royce boss, told analysts: “Electrification is an inescapable trend in industrial markets today. And that includes in aerospace, in due course, but it’s actually present today in many of the markets that we serve through our power systems business.”

The group is also hoping to pioneer small-scale modular nuclear reactors which could be built at a fraction of the cost of traditional giant nuclear plants.