Lithium News

The large-scale adoption of solar and wind, two of the most popular renewable energy sources, requires massive energy storage systems. And the high-cost of energy-related metals like cobalt, vanadium and lithium makes it expensive to produce storage batteries. But zinc air battery technology offers a viable alternative solution.

Growing Demand for Renewable Solar Energy

The demand for clean, renewable energy in North America and around the world is as strong as ever. A new report from research firm DGA on the growing demand for renewable energy finds that 83 percent of major U.S. and global manufacturers have set targets on greenhouse gas reduction, and 25 percent of manufacturers have already established renewable energy. The report finds that leading companies like Anheuser-Busch InBev, Nestle, Nike, Unilever, and VF Corporation have 100 percent renewable energy commitments already in place.

Manufacturers that buy renewable energy from nearby solar and wind farms can increase the resilience of the grid and help support local economic development. The ten year global trend of solar capacity shows an increase to almost 400 GW in 2017, from under 10 GW in 2007, according to the International Renewable Energy Administration. And if a change in public sentiment towards renewable energy isn’t enough to drive solar demand even higher, President Trump’s protectionist decrees surely will.

Trump recently imposed a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels in an attempt to protect American jobs. The tariffs have been equally criticized and applauded. While an increase in consumer prices is expected, so is an increase in domestic production, which would add to the “new era of power generation” that saw solar power become the world’s fastest-growing source of new energy in 2017.

“What we are witnessing is the birth of a new era in solar photovoltaics [PV],” says Dr. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

“We expect that solar PV capacity growth will be higher than any other renewable technology up to2022.”

Challenges in Large-Scale Energy Storage

Storing energy on a mass scale is among the challenges that come with the growing demand, and production, of solar energy, as well as demand for transparent ceramics needed to transport energy sources.

Developed western nations often account for the largest portion of the demand for transparent ceramics because of their increased use in the aerospace and defense industries. Most transparent ceramics production facilities find it difficult to expand geographically because of the high transportation and logistics costs. This is aggravated by the fragility of ceramic materials, so safe transportation of these materials is a concern.

“Intermittency” is also known to be one of the main barriers to large scale solar deployment. It’s the variability of energy output from solar sources that inevitably produce irregular or disrupted patterns of electrical output. For instance, solar energy needs light to operate at maximum capacity, which isn’t always available. The one way to compensate for intermittency is by backing up solar energy with an alternative energy supply, like battery storage.

But issues with traditional battery components lithium, cobalt and vanadium, leave the solar industry looking for an available, low-cost solution.

Phones are about to charge super fast, thanks to the strongest material ever recorded. Graphine is a single layer of graphite that’s highly conductive. It’s 100x more conductive than copper, 200x stronger than steel, 100x lighter than aluminum and can increase a battery’s charging rate by 5. It’s all thanks so graphene’s ability to transfer energy 140x faster than lithium, today’s standard battery material.

Graphite Energy Corp. stated, “It is flexible, transparent, impermeable to moisture, stronger than diamonds and more conductive than gold. Experts hint to graphene as a miracle material that will improve many products, including the battery.”

Samsung is already using this technology in the new Galaxy S9 and S9+ phones and stated, “With standard lithium batteries requiring times of at least an hour to fully charge, ever with quick charging technology graphine has widely become the primary source of interest as the representative next generation material.”

Battery tech has been a hot topic of research lately, as electric vehicles gain popularity and smartphones get smaller and more powerful. Lithium-ion batteries have been the default since 1991, but this graphene tech could be the changing tide that brings faster, lighter, more powerful batteries to the future smartphone stratosphere.

ZincFive’s new Model 48-3-208 advanced Uninterruptible Power Supply with nickel-zinc batteries has been designed to deliver new standards in performance, safety and simplicity.

In 2016 ZincFive introduced the world’s first nickel-zinc battery as a safer alternative to lead acid and lithium ion batteries. It was aimed at intelligent transportation, data centres and telecommunications where a safe battery backup system is needed in order to keep systems operational even when the mainstream utility power supply fails.

The company has now developed a new UPS system, the ZincFive UPS Model 48-3-208, which will be launched at the Data Centre World Global 2018 event in San Antonio between 12^th-15^th March.  It combines nickel-zinc batteries with intelligent modular inverter technology from CE+T Power. This makes it scalable, offering a 6 kW to 48 kW, 3 phase, power-dense, lightweight, small footprint building block design with capacity upgrades in 6 kW increments, enabling customers to surgically install precise levels of power protection where and when they need it.

The nickel-zinc batteries are safer than lead acid and lithium ion while also being considerably more powerful. They are also more environmentally friendly and are designed to enable the energy storage industry’s only touch-safe UPS.Capacity upgrades can be achieved simply by adding new inverter modules.

Two UK universities have partnered with Superdielectrics, the engineering and research firm, on a project to develop lithium-ion battery alternatives.

The new project follows the results the Universities of Surrey and Bristol found when testing novel polymer materials.

The findings on the materials with dielectric properties between 1,000 and 10,000 times larger than electrolytes have been converted into ‘device’ scale demonstrations.

The two educational establishments and the engineering firm have announced they will be researching, developing, and testing supercapacitators.

From the results Superdielectrics, the developer of the technology, aims to create a researche and production centre to enable further technological advances.

The supercapacitator battery alternative is more time-efficient as it uses electrodes and electrolytes, which charge faster.

Opposed to lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitators can charge and recharge for a significant amount of cycles whilst remaining speedier than traditional cells.

However, so far supercapacitators cannot compete with conventional batteries in regards to storage, as they can only hold approximately one-twentieth of what a lithium-ion cell can.

China has adapted the modern technology for its buses but has found they require recharging at almost every stop.

The institutions will be testing single layer cells charged with 1.5 volts to power small devices, and three-cell stacks that can be rapidly charged to power an LED.

The University of Bristol will also work on another project, creating a parallel cell structure allowing capacitance and voltage operations to separately be controlled.

The reality of battery-powered ULCCs may still be some way into the future, but ferry firms are among an increasing number of companies operating smaller vessels that are swapping traditional oil-based bunkers for battery power.

Among those are Norway’s Fjord1, who today said it had placed an order for seven new battery-powered ferries that will all feature “zero and low-emission technology based on electric propulsion.”

The ferries will carry between 50 and 80 passengers and are expected to be delivered during the fall of 2019.

Stena Line, meanwhile, Friday said it recently signed a contract with Callenberg Technology Group that will see marine batteries installed on the Stena Jutlandica. The vessel can carry up to 1,500 passengers and 550 cars.

The tech is being rolled out across three phases, and starting this Summer it will initially allow the vessel to operate on battery power during berthing operations.

A second phase will see the vessel use battery power for around 10 nautical miles of its journey, before a final third step will allow Stena Jutlandica to complete its entire 50 nautical mile route between Gothenburg and Frederikshavn on battery power.

“As both the size and cost of batteries decreases, battery operation is becoming a very exciting alternative to traditional fuels for shipping, with the added prospect of emissions to the air being completely eliminated,” says Stena Line’s CEO Niclas Mårtensson.

Ferries are not the only current candidates for battery power. Last month Corvus Energy said it would fit four platform supply vessels (PSV) active in the Gulf of Mexico with lithium ion-based batteries.

Imagine being able to charge your electric car in minutes rather than hours, or your smartphone in seconds.

That’s the enticing prospect being touted by researchers who reckon they’ve discovered a new material that could boost the performance of a carbon-based supercapacitor – sometimes called an ultracapacitor – a type of energy storage device that can be charged very quickly and offload its power very quickly, too.

Dr Donald Highgate, director of research at Superdielectrics Ltd, says a material he originally developed for soft contact lenses is also surprisingly good at holding an electrostatic field.

Very simply, supercapacitors don’t produce electricity through chemical reactions as conventional batteries do, they create these electrostatic fields.

Dr Highgate is working with Bristol and Surrey universities to develop supercapacitors using the new polymer and hopes that they could eventually rival, or even surpass, lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries – so long as they manage to replicate prototype performance on a large scale.

So far, supercapacitors have been good at providing quick bursts of power – to start a car engine, for example, or to give trains a boost when accelerating. They’re also well-suited to harvesting energy from vehicles when they brake, making them an important component in electric vehicles.

And national electricity grids use them to provide quick power top-ups when balancing supply and demand.

South Korea’s capital Seoul is hoping to have 3,500 supercapacitor-powered buses operating by 2020, and they’re also being used in Shanghai, China. European car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen has been using them in its cars since 2010 – supercapacitor maker Maxwell Technologies says more than a million vehicles now incorporate its products.

But to date, supercapacitors haven’t been very good at holding much power or holding on to that power for very long.

This poor energy density, as it’s called, the amount of power they can hold per kilogramme, has put them at a significant disadvantage to li-ion batteries.