LIB energy storage

[Yura Liang]

Pumped energy storage still occupies a large part of the energy storage market, but lithium battery energy storage seems to have great development potential. Do you think lithium battery storage has a chance to surpass pumped storage in the future? This article gave me some thinking after reading it.


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[NiHaoMike]

As electrical energy storage, it will definitely become a bigger and bigger player. But I think thermal storage for HVAC would become the biggest energy storage technology in terms of stored energy simply because it's extremely cheap to build. Pound per pound, making ice yields about the same cooling as using lithium batteries to run a conventional air conditioner, but water is orders of magnitude cheaper.

[PaulAm]

Flow batteries are starting to edge into the grid storage arena.  It will be interesting to see how they play out.

[penfold]

There's been some good work in lithium battery-based grid storage for load levelling and frequency stabilisation etc. I think the primary driver for that was the second-life uses for those former-EV batteries which no longer have a good-enough charge capacity for EV use. As an intended application for brand-new lithium, I'm not aware that they have quite the necessary total through-put efficiency to really make them stand out in that regard, and until the lithium battery recycling infrastructure has reached some greater maturity hard to really quantify what the economic/political impact of making it a permanent fixture of the electricity grids will be.

A big problem the UK has (among so many other problems) is the aging grid infrastructure. Even in the face of EVs actually becoming commonplace, still very little has been done or planned to address the distribution issues that were identified a long time ago. In that regard, the possibility of lithium-based storage distributed across the network tends would certainly be a good sticking-plaster solution to stop the "sensitivity" of the network as the background load continues to grow.

So I suppose the general governing factor as to whether localized load balancing is better implemented with second-life lithium or NaS is down to which one offers the best long-term availability security of materials supply and minimal maintenance. They both scale well for that kind of use case and it's a use-case that is difficult to satisfy with pumped storage or 'other'.

[Fflint]

I doubt that unless lithium mining, refining and manufacturing technology can be found that can be done anywhere in the world. As is there are only few sources of raw ingredients for lithium batteries and refining looks like this:

Up closer:


Those are huge brine pools that kill anything that has the misfortune of falling into them. They are located in a "salt flats" area in Chile. The area has lots of salt in the ground anyway so this refining facility can be justified in that location. However, can you imagine something like this in Europe for example?

Unless we can decentralise procurement of raw materials, refining and production there will always be ways for enterprising individuals to create choke points in global supply and profit handsomely from letting a highly priced trickle of those batteries through when we need a flood of cheap ones.

So my answer is, no, not until we can make lithium batteries from local resources. Perhaps it will happen. I hope some governments are sponsoring research like this.