
Form Energy gets its first grid-scale battery installation - makaroni1
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/in-a-potential-big-win-for-renewable-energy-form-energy-gets-its-first-grid-scale-battery-installation/
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pjc50
This is a press release. There are a _lot_ of battery announcements, and we
should basically ignore the ones that don't have a constructed installation in
operation.

There are a few flow batteries about using the vanadium-redox chemistry:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/vanadium-
re...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/vanadium-redox-flow-
battery) \- and that web page lists operating installations.

From the other comments it appears this might be sulfur:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435117300326)

The reasoning is sound; for every element on the periodic table, you can
assign a dollar cost, and an ionization energy. From the ionization energy you
can work out the electrode voltage of a particular chemistry, and therefore
the terminal voltage of the battery, and therefore how much energy is
liberated from each electron exchange. Divide "watts per atom" by "dollars per
atom" and you have your bulk storage cost. Throw out all the substances that
are annoying to store (sorry, hydrogen), or don't behave nicely in an ionic
liquid at room temperature.

That gives you the smattering of elements that have been tried for batteries.
Lithium wins on weight because it's at the top left (sorry again, hydrogen),
and the collection of "post-transition metals". Zinc, Cadmium, Mercury, Lead:
all popular. Aluminium-air batteries exist but are expensive.

Sulphur seems all on its on in the "reactive nonmetals" bucket. I'm guessing
it's being considered due to availability especially in sulphuric acid form.

~~~
marcosdumay
The paper you link to is about a battery that reacts oxygen with a metal-
sulfur radical.

It does not convert metals between metallic and ionized forms, and does not
take sulfur into or out of the complex, so your can't just traverse the
periodic table and get there. On practice battery research is about ballacing
a much larger set of features, like cycle efficiency and durability, so the
obvious metal+halogen solution almost always loses.

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epistasis
Edit: after poking around Twitter (a useful resource for energy tech), I found
this pointer to a paper describing the tech:

[https://twitter.com/jburwen/status/1258483960964939776?s=21](https://twitter.com/jburwen/status/1258483960964939776?s=21)

Usually a website and PR that is this weak on details would raise lots of red
flags for me, but Mateo Jaramillo is one of the cofounders and I was really
curious what he was up to since left Tesla, turns out its this. He was on a
podcast a while back talking about seasonal storage. While this battery
doesn't appear to be that, maybe it will form the basis for seasonal storage.

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baking
Here is a lecture on the technology by MIT Professor Yet-Ming Chiang from the
MIT Club of Northern California last October.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E76q-9q7ZDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E76q-9q7ZDg)

(Edit: After rewatching, a little short on the actual tech, but tons of info
on the chemistry, materials science, markets, and economics of battery storage
in all of its forms. Here is the original paper
[https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(17)30032-6.pdf](https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351\(17\)30032-6.pdf))

MIT Professor Donald Sadoway also invented a liquid metal battery and founded
a company called Ambri. Talks by him are easier to find.

Both have interesting tech, flexible chemistry, and good price models that
beat wildly optimistic lithium ion battery price forecasts.

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rocketpastsix
The entire title of the article so you aren't confused:

In a potential big win for renewable energy, Form Energy gets its first grid-
scale battery installation

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beckingz
The lack of technical details is unfortunate.

Still, the ratio of megawatts to megawatthours is quite interesting if it
represents their chemistry.

~~~
epistasis
Looks to be a flow battery, so the power to energy ratio is tunable by
changing the ratio of membrane surface area to storage tank volume. The
chemistry is likely either sodium sulfur or lithium sulfur.

If the anolyte/catholyte can be made cheaply enough, it may actually be able
to do seasonal storage economically. However as wind and solar get cheaper,
I'm not sure we will need it. The cost of curtailment during peak season is
going to fall just as quickly as the cost of panels falls, and that cost is
ultimately what seasonal storage has to compete against.

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markvdb
TLDR: first deployment of Form Energy's "aqueous air" grid battery, 1
megawatt, 150 megawatt hour, no tech details.

MIT professor founder, backed by Bill Gates amongst others.

According to MIT tech review [0] , their main line of research is an "air-
breathing aqueous sulfur flow battery".

~~~
impostervt
Ya, it's basically a press release. Does the solution exist or are they going
to be developing it as they go? What's it look like?

~~~
xchaotic
Exactly, is it chemistry based (iron oxide) or pumping water?

~~~
1958325146
It looks like an iron-based chemistry: [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=20200136153.PGNR).

~~~
1958325146
Sorry, you have to append a period to a URL to make it work. HN does not
believe in URLs that end in periods, apparently.

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cushychicken
Congrats to Form Energy from a fellow Somervillain. :)

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gonesilent
The batterys failed end users before...

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ThomPete
The hype around renewable never ceases to amaze me.

The complete absence of any critical journalism is just astounding.

So many "in the future" "potential" "could" "might" "eventually" in these kind
of articles.

It's a pilot project, they don't know if it will work but they might have some
software that can help it and a breakthrough method that might work.

Amazing if they manage to do it, I wouldn't count on it personally.

~~~
Tade0
There are many "potential" and "could", but there are enough "are quietly
revolutionizing" to justify he hype.

You just don't see them because they get quietly merged in the process.

Storage is currently _twice_ as cheap as it was just two years ago and doesn't
appear to be slowing down. Hell, it's growning at an exponential rate.

~~~
ThomPete
I have followed this strain of industry for many years and have been actively
looking for something to invest in.

Storage is not even close to being at a useful stage for anything other than
pilot projects which is why that is what we have and not any really large
scale storage facilities and won't have it anytime soon. It's not a matter of
economics but physics and we just don't have any fundamental scientific
discoveries that warrant the hype we see.

~~~
epistasis
> It's not a matter of economics but physics

What physics principle can you cite here? There are no physical limits that
have stoped the current grid scale deployments.

It's all economics: how cheaply can you get materials to your factory and how
cheaply can you roll your batteries.

(And just a warning, this sort of invocation if physics when it doesn't apply
is a way to scare off technical people from wanting to let you invest in
them.)

There are real, grid scale installations in California, Australia, and other
places in very recent years. Another GWh will be deployed to Moss Landing, CA
soon.

The real problem is convincing utility execs to try something new. Based on
how they are regulated, saving money doesn't necessarily mean that they can
increase their profits. And in fact rate-basing means that they often want to
spend a ton of money on unnecessary projects.

~~~
netflixandkill
Essentially all existing gridscale battery deployments are for voltage or
frequency support, not for meaningful energy storage. That is, they do not
discharge to provide scheduled generation but instead to alleviate very short
term flow problems or transmission congestion.

That's all good stuff and I've been involved in planning out several such
installations with utility executives, but the basic question of energy
density is always going to dictate whether or not a battery installation can
be be scaled up to offset a generator by timeshifting surplus generation to
when the load exists for it.

A moderate size city can easily pull GWh. The sum total of all current grid
scale installations in California would cover the Western Interconnect for
something like .0002 seconds if you handwave transmission.

~~~
battery_cowboy
You're mostly incorrect here, most grid scale installations are for DCM and
local capacity in areas where the grid is oversubscribed. You're correct that
current storage capacity is small but there are a lot of companies installing
storage so that'll change quickly. The software works fine for this stuff,
too, I wrote some of it at one company, it's not a hard software problem at
all.

~~~
ThomPete
Please point to a single place where this works at scale.

It's wishful thinking.

