Lithium News

Sweltering weather across southern Australia sparked power price spikes on Friday and prompted the national grid operator to put emergency generators on standby.

Temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104°F) represent the first major test of the energy grid this year after nearly 2,000 megawatts of extra capacity were added to prevent blackouts that have previously hit household and industrial users.

The extra capacity includes the world’s biggest lithium ion battery built by Tesla Inc, which was switched on last month and provides 120 megawatts.

Scorching conditions stretch the grid as people crank up power-hungry air conditioners, while the heat reduces the capacity of transmission wires to carry electricity.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which runs the national electricity market, expected a decline in reserves in the states of Victoria and South Australia on Friday afternoon, but no disruption to supply.

It asked generators that feed power into the grid to be on standby to supply extra power in those states.

Forecast wholesale spot power prices for dispatch on Friday afternoon in South Australia and Victoria have spiked to the capped level of A$14,200 ($11,366) per megawatt hour (MWh), AEMO said on its website.

Last summer was the first in eight years to see power failures in Australia’s southeastern states, including outages that forced BHP Billiton to stop production at its Olympic Dam mine for two weeks and Alcoa Corp to shut one of two potlines at its Portland aluminium smelter.

Alcoa, one of the biggest electricity users in Victoria, is one of several industrial customers asked by AEMO to go on standby to reduce electricity demand if necessary on Friday afternoon.

“If managed appropriately Portland smelter can be safely curtailed for short time periods (up to one hour) to provide much needed capacity during peak demand periods,” Alcoa said in a statement.

BHP declined to comment on whether its operations could be impacted.

Today, there are select cases in which lithium-ion batteries are competitive with natural-gas peaker plants. However, in a few years, competition will intensify across the country. And with costs only headed downward, GTM Research and Wood Mackenzie believe that batteries overtaking peakers may be a common occurrence in the U.S. in as little as four years.

FIGURE: Base Case Levelized Cost of Energy – Peaking Gas Combustion Turbine vs. 4hr Li-ion Battery Storage ($/MWh)

Over the next 10 years, the U.S. needs to add 20 gigawatts of peaking capacity to its grid. Over half of that capacity will come on-line in the latter part of the decade: 7,440 megawatts between 2018 to 2020 compared to 12,645 megawatts between 2023 and 2027. That gives energy storage more time to build an economic advantage.

According to a new report, by 2022, new natural-gas peakers will regularly compete head to head with energy storage. In ten years, new natural gas peakers may become a rare sight.

Join GTM Research’s Energy Storage Director to learn:

• How and where energy storage is being integrated into resource planning
• Which U.S. markets will see a surge in peaking capacity additions
• How and when storage will become economic with natural gas
• What could accelerate or slow this shift

Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists have observed an unexpected phenomenon in lithium-ion batteries – the most common type of battery used to power cell phones and electric cars. As a model battery generated electric current, the scientists witnessed the concentration of lithium inside individual nanoparticles reverse at a certain point, instead of constantly increasing.

This discovery, published in the journal Science Advances, is a major step toward improving the battery life of consumer electronics.

Esther Takeuchi, a SUNY distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and a chief scientist in the Energy Sciences Directorate at Brookhaven Lab said, “If you have a cell phone, you likely need to charge its battery every day, due to the limited capacity of the battery’s electrodes. The findings in this study could help develop batteries that charge faster and last longer.”

Inside every lithium-ion battery are particles whose atoms are arranged in a lattice – a periodic structure with gaps between the atoms. When a lithium-ion battery supplies electricity, lithium ions flow into empty sites in the atomic lattice.

This diagram shows the spread of positively charged lithium ions across the custom-built FeF2 nanoparticle. The conversion reaction sweeps rapidly across the surface before proceeding more slowly in a layer-by-layer fashion through the bulk of the particle. Image Credit: Brookhaven National Lab. Click image for the largest view.

Wei Zhang, a scientist at Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department explained, “Previously, scientists assumed that the concentration of lithium would continuously increase in the lattice. But now, we have seen that this may not be true when the battery’s electrodes are made from nano-sized particles. We observed the lithium concentration within local regions of nanoparticles go up, and then down – it reversed.”

Electrodes are often made from nanoparticles in order to increase a battery’s power density. But scientists have not been able to fully understand how these electrodes function, due to a limited ability to watch them work in action. Now, with a unique combination of experimental tools, the scientists were able to image reactions inside the electrodes in real time.

Feng Wang, the leader of this study and a scientist in Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department took the explanation further, “Similar to how a sponge soaks up water, we can see the overall level of lithium continuously increase inside the nano-sized particles. But unlike water, lithium may preferentially move out of some areas, creating inconsistent levels of lithium across the lattice.”

The scientists explained that uneven movement of lithium could have lasting, damaging effects because it strains the structure of the active materials in batteries and can lead to fatigue failure.

“Before lithium enters the lattice, its structure is very uniform,” Wang said. “But once lithium goes in, it stretches the lattice, and when lithium goes out, the lattice shrinks. So each time you charge and drain a battery, its active component will be stressed, and its quality will degrade over time. Therefore, it is important to characterize and understand how lithium concentration changes both in space and time.”

In order to make these observations, the scientists combined transmission electron microscopy (TEM) experiments, conducted at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab, and at Brookhaven’s Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department, with x-ray analyses at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). NSLS is a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven that closed in 2014 when its successor, NSLS-II, opened.

Yimei Zhu, co-author of the study and a senior physicist at Brookhaven Lab said, “Wang’s team combined TEM with x-ray techniques. Both methods use a similar approach to analyze the structure of materials, but can provide complementary information. Electrons are sensitive to the local structure, while x-rays can probe a larger volume and enable much better statistics.”

The Brookhaven team also developed a nanoscale model battery that could mimic the function of lithium-ion batteries that would “fit” into a TEM. Computer simulations conducted at the University of Michigan further confirmed the surprising conclusions.

Katsuyo Thornton, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who led the theoretical effort said, “We initially thought that the reversal mechanism was similar to those previously proposed, which stemmed from the interactions between nearby particles. However, it turned out a concentration reversal within a single particle could not be explained by existing theories, but rather, it arises from a different mechanism. Simulations were critical in this work because, without them, we would have made an incorrect conclusion.”

While the study focused on lithium-ion batteries, the scientists say the observed phenomenon may also occur in other high-performance battery chemistries.

Wang said, “Down the road, we plan to use the world-class facilities at CFN and NSLS-II to more closely examine how battery materials work, and to find solutions for building new batteries that can charge faster and last longer. These facilities offer the ideal tools for imaging the structure of battery materials in real time and under real-world conditions.”

It sure looks like some taxpayer money is paying off here. Portability of devices is just getting going and miniaturization is going to bring more tools and conveniences to us. Better batteries will get them here sooner and more powerful even faster.

In the aftermath of recent car emission scandals, governments in countries such as France are strongly encouraging carmakers to go electric. Paris wants to banish petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

Elsewhere, such as the UK, diesel car demand has slowed. In turn this shift has refocused attention on low or zero emission electric vehicles. Those EVs require batteries, and prices of their key inputs — lithium, cobalt, lead and nickel — have soared.

The first two of these have attracted the most interest given their current importance to batteries. Together they make up about half of a battery’s cathode. No surprise that prices for each have trebled in less than three years.

Neither it is no surprise that share prices of both lithium and cobalt producers have also rocketed. But while nickel could replace some of the cobalt required over time, as cathode technology evolves, lithium should remain integral to all batteries for some time.

And lithium demand looks healthy, compounding at a 14 per cent rate between 2017 and 2022. That’s because sales of rechargeable batteries should treble by 2025 to $59bn, according to Credit Suisse, as buyers take up electrified vehicles, both hybrids and fully electric.

You know a bull market has arrived, though, when specialist indices and exchange traded funds appear for lithium. Have a look at what’s inside, though. The Solactive Global Lithium index not only has lithium makers such as US listed Albemarle and FMC Corp, it also contains carmakers Tesla and BYD. More than 40 per cent of index members at best only consume lithium. This index has more than doubled since early 2016. Junior miners such as Australia’s Galaxy Resources have been six baggers.

Even as demand builds, supply too is surging. Although Argentina and Chile used to make a large proportion of lithium carbonate, that balance will shift.

Australia’s contribution is increasing so rapidly that an excess supply of lithium carbonate is likely for the next couple years at least. “It’s our top short idea,” says Vivienne Lloyd at Macquarie.

Should lithium prices finally tumble, expect the lithium miners to head back to ground.

It’s an exciting time for solid state batteries. BMW announced last month that it’s teamed up with Colorado-based battery developer Solid Power, which could see the automaker ditch the liquid electrolyte lithium-ion cells of yesteryear in favor of a solid alternative that’s safer, higher-energy, and simpler.

“I don’t wanna sit here and claim that all the technical challenges are solved,” Doug Campbell, the CEO of Solid Power, tells Inverse. “It’s a vote of confidence in that some of the fundamental historical concerns for solid state, I think this is a reflection that these have been solved, at least from a feasibility standpoint.”

Long touted as a dream alternative to current batteries, it’s estimated that solid state batteries could store twice as much energy. In the case of the second-generation Tesla Roadster, it could help double the 620-mile range from its 200 kilowatt-hour battery.

It’s not unreasonable to think Tesla could adopt the cells, either: Elon Musk alluded to “the most significant [battery] breakthrough in a while” that “could be made to work” in an August 2017 investor call. Los Angeles to Seattle on a single charge, anyone?

However, it’s not as easy as it sounds to swap out existing materials for new ones. SolidEnergy, a company that spun out of MIT in 2012, ended out using a combination of solid and liquid electrolytes to maintain the same levels of conductivity while providing the added capacity. Sakti3, a subsidiary of Dyson, made a breakthrough last year when it employed a thin-film deposition process to stop the electrodes from touching.

One of the biggest hurdles in getting this dream car on the roads is the qualification process. That means getting manufacturing up to scale, passing through regulatory hurdles, and ensuring the technology is safe for roads. Because of this, Campbell believes we’ll be able to drive a solid state battery car in the next five to 10 years from now. Anything sooner than that is unrealistic.

“I know [Toyota] have been involved in this space for a very long time, and they have a lot of resources,” Campbell says. “I can say just through the interactions I’ve had with partners of Toyota, I deduce that they’re not any further than we are, but I’m not operating on any privileged information.”

Another major hurdle is recharge time. While Tesla touts half-hour recharge times from its 120-kilowatt supercharging stations, it’s a rate that takes its toll on the battery.

It’s going to be hard to persuade people to sit around for hours waiting for their car to charge, especially if these batteries enter the market after years of electric vehicle adoption. Nonetheless, the future of alternative fuel cars is looking decidedly solid.