Strange to hear that our grid relies so much on oil and imported natural gas. I live in Northern New England and our local power company assures me that nearly all of our power comes from...
Strange to hear that our grid relies so much on oil and imported natural gas. I live in Northern New England and our local power company assures me that nearly all of our power comes from hydroelectric power, much of it Canadian. Perhaps Southern New England doesn't get as much of that? (they certainly have fewer dams per capita)
I'm skeptical of using chemical batteries for large-scale energy storage. Can't you just pump water uphill into a reservoir for a similar effect, without the nasty lithium etc?
As @skybrian touched on, Form Energy's big sell is that they're iron air batteries. When iron rusts it creates a small voltage potential in the process. The problem is that the voltage potential...
As @skybrian touched on, Form Energy's big sell is that they're iron air batteries. When iron rusts it creates a small voltage potential in the process. The problem is that the voltage potential is much smaller than with lithium chemisties so they haven't made much headway as a battery technology until relatively recently. Iron-air batteries for a car? Super impractical because of how heavy they'd be for the amount of energy they bring. Grid batteries that are going to sit in a warehouse for 100 years? Sounds like a good deal to me.
So the process basically rusts iron to discharge and then reverses the processes while charging. Supposedly the battery metals don't break down like with other chemistries, but even if it did, recycling and reprocessing iron is something we're already really good at.
Lots of upsides (low cost, no toxicity, abundant source material, no thermal runaway/fire risk), the only drawback I think is it takes a lot more space (I think about 3 times the volume) for an equal amount of energy compared to a lithium battery. But as far as I can tell that's a great trade off for this application especially for how much cheaper they should be.
Pumped hydro looks good on paper but has lots of challenges in practice. You need water (likely not an issue for Maine but definitely an issue in the western US), once you pump it up hill you'll always be loosing energy potential to evaporation, and damage to local ecosystems from building a new dam. So I think when it comes to hydro we should be upgrading, maintaining, and improving existing hydro infrastructure, but I don't think building new hydro makes as much environmental and cost sense when compared to something like iron-air batteries for grid storage. If you compare it to lithium there may not be as much competition, but the battery may still have slight advantage. Though, for iron batteries I think they'll probably use less space, less water, and do less environmental damage than an equivalent amount of hydro. Their round trip efficiency is probably also going to be better (I think above 80%) compared to the round trip efficiency for pumped hydro is something like ~60% a lot of the time.
If a power generation expert swings by please do let me know if I got any of these details wrong.
Excellent point, I guess I should have had my morning coffee before reading the article! It's nice to see a simpler battery chemistry being used. Hopefully the longevity beats lithium chemistries...
Excellent point, I guess I should have had my morning coffee before reading the article!
It's nice to see a simpler battery chemistry being used. Hopefully the longevity beats lithium chemistries as well. But I do have to wonder if, once we account for all of the manufacturing, processing, etc it truly beats using even simpler forces like gravity.
AIUI the iron-air needs a ton of plastic membranes to keep the iron separated from the air (a membrane which wears out and needs to be replaced), so its inputs aren't as environmentally friendly...
AIUI the iron-air needs a ton of plastic membranes to keep the iron separated from the air (a membrane which wears out and needs to be replaced), so its inputs aren't as environmentally friendly and long-term replaceable as you'd think.
Form Energy, headed by former Tesla engineer Matteo Jaramillo, is making batteries that can keep on supplying the grid for up to 100 hours. Now it says it will build an 85 MW/8500 MWh battery storage system on the site of a former paper mill near Bangor, Maine.
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The installation is being made possible by $147 million in financing from the US Department of Energy, part of a $389 million grant package announced last week to strengthen the New England energy grid in anticipation of the large influx of renewable energy Maine expects from offshore wind farms in the near future.
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The Form Energy installation in Maine is huge in comparison to the projects the company has agreed to build for a handful of utility companies to date. Minnesota’s Great River Energy inked the first deal with Form, and is slated to get its pilot project early next year, Jaramillo said. Customers like Xcel Energy and Southern Company will receive Form installations after that.
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The New England grid needs all the help it can get. The region has limited supplies of fossil gas, thanks in part to environmental attitudes in the state of New York, which has blocked new pipelines. This has forced the region to supply itself with liquefied natural gas imports because the century-old protectionist law called the Jones Act makes it prohibitively expensive to ship in cheap American gas. That stress becomes especially risky in the winter, because home heating gets first dibs on the fuel.
When a cold spell strikes, and gas runs low, power plants switch to burning oil, which sets back the region’s ambitious commitments to reduce its climate-altering emissions. The region’s independent system operator, which runs the grid, has modeled likely scenarios in which the grid could run out of power for extended periods of time, and there are a lot of ways that could happen.
Strange to hear that our grid relies so much on oil and imported natural gas. I live in Northern New England and our local power company assures me that nearly all of our power comes from hydroelectric power, much of it Canadian. Perhaps Southern New England doesn't get as much of that? (they certainly have fewer dams per capita)
I'm skeptical of using chemical batteries for large-scale energy storage. Can't you just pump water uphill into a reservoir for a similar effect, without the nasty lithium etc?
As @skybrian touched on, Form Energy's big sell is that they're iron air batteries. When iron rusts it creates a small voltage potential in the process. The problem is that the voltage potential is much smaller than with lithium chemisties so they haven't made much headway as a battery technology until relatively recently. Iron-air batteries for a car? Super impractical because of how heavy they'd be for the amount of energy they bring. Grid batteries that are going to sit in a warehouse for 100 years? Sounds like a good deal to me.
So the process basically rusts iron to discharge and then reverses the processes while charging. Supposedly the battery metals don't break down like with other chemistries, but even if it did, recycling and reprocessing iron is something we're already really good at.
Lots of upsides (low cost, no toxicity, abundant source material, no thermal runaway/fire risk), the only drawback I think is it takes a lot more space (I think about 3 times the volume) for an equal amount of energy compared to a lithium battery. But as far as I can tell that's a great trade off for this application especially for how much cheaper they should be.
Pumped hydro looks good on paper but has lots of challenges in practice. You need water (likely not an issue for Maine but definitely an issue in the western US), once you pump it up hill you'll always be loosing energy potential to evaporation, and damage to local ecosystems from building a new dam. So I think when it comes to hydro we should be upgrading, maintaining, and improving existing hydro infrastructure, but I don't think building new hydro makes as much environmental and cost sense when compared to something like iron-air batteries for grid storage. If you compare it to lithium there may not be as much competition, but the battery may still have slight advantage. Though, for iron batteries I think they'll probably use less space, less water, and do less environmental damage than an equivalent amount of hydro. Their round trip efficiency is probably also going to be better (I think above 80%) compared to the round trip efficiency for pumped hydro is something like ~60% a lot of the time.
If a power generation expert swings by please do let me know if I got any of these details wrong.
These batteries use a different technology, iron-air. No lithium needed?
Excellent point, I guess I should have had my morning coffee before reading the article!
It's nice to see a simpler battery chemistry being used. Hopefully the longevity beats lithium chemistries as well. But I do have to wonder if, once we account for all of the manufacturing, processing, etc it truly beats using even simpler forces like gravity.
AIUI the iron-air needs a ton of plastic membranes to keep the iron separated from the air (a membrane which wears out and needs to be replaced), so its inputs aren't as environmentally friendly and long-term replaceable as you'd think.
From the article:
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