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Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

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Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#121

Post by specialist »

coder543 wrote: post #75
lazide wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, that really doesn’t make any sense. There is several missing factors here, and it’s a useless metric. Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well - based on discharge rate. It can also do 10 minutes - based on discharge rate. 100 hours is literally useless on it’s own because it doesn’t tell you anything concrete. 100 hours….. of what? It looks like a classic science writing article where they left all the impo…

> > You could do the same thing with Lithium Ion, it would just be cost prohibitive... 10x as expensive, supposedly. > Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well Did you reply to the wrong person? I already addressed your entire comment several different ways in my original comment, and you didn't address anything I wrote in mine, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm not the best at explaining things? > 100 hours... of what?…

Nicely done. Thank you.

Am total noob. Been learning from The Limiting Factor on youtube that many different Li-ion chemistries have different use cases, ideal applications, knock-on considerations.

Why Tesla intends to use different chemistries for car, cybertruck, semi, powerwall, etc. Why others are choosing different chemistries, like Apple and lithium-titanium, for their particular needs. (Such subtlety. Total nerdgasm. What a time to be alive.)

So your explanation makes perfect sense.

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#122

Post by specialist »

coder543 wrote: post #118
amelius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a term that summarizes many of the complex properties you mentioned. Ok, then would you be so kind to show how to compute these properties from this single term?

Would you be so kind as to show how to reverse a hash? A summary is like a hash; it throws away information deemed irrelevant to the task at hand, but it is still related to the input information. So, no, I won't show how to do that, because it's impossible, and I never claimed otherwise. I just love these "gotcha!" comments that pop up on HN so frequently. I'm having to explain what it means to summarize information…

> I'm having to explain what it means to summarize information.

It is what it is.

FWIW, I use HN as batting practice, to refine my talking points.

A terrific recent example is Scott Galloway advocating breaking up big tech. Observing his message craft over the years is instructive, inspirational. He now says stuff like "oxygenate the market". Brilliant.

Choice of metaphor matters. "The different between the right word and almost right word is the different between lighting and a lightning bug." -- Mark Twain (from memory)

Keep going. You're doing great!

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#123

Post by dtgriscom »

coder543 wrote: post #76
lowercase1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can take a battery and just decrease the discharge rate and claim "long duration storage". The hard part is making it cheaper per kWh. If they made it cheaper per kWh then they should say that

> If they made it cheaper per kWh then they should say that They do say that. Quote from the article: > at less than 1/10th the cost of lithium-ion "100 hours" isn't an advantage for this technology. The advantage is the cost effectiveness. "100 hour battery" mostly means that it will take 100 hours to discharge one of these batteries (of any capacity) at the maximum discharge rate that the technology allows. Obvious…

This is the key statement: with this number, more isn't better. It just clarifies which class of discharge rate you're competing with. When discussing batteries which take at least 100 hours to discharge, this battery looks to be the most cost-effective.

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#124

Post by lazide »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #107
warble wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery engineer here. 100 hours doesn't mean much by itself

hey battery engineer. can you help me out with this stupid solar home battery confusion i have been having? 1 battery system is 12volt X 180AH =2160WH. (lets say lead acid) 2 battery system is 48Volt x 45AH=2160WH(Lets say this is lithium) if i am using an inverter to convert DC to AC viz 220volt where my AC appliances run, does it matter on the battery side? if i have a load, say a pc running 1 KWH, will these two b…

Not the parent poster, but do have some familiarity here.

Higher battery voltage == less copper, smaller wires for the same wattage. Sometimes also a bit more efficiency too (less resistance, smaller absolute voltage drop moving current around).

Your units are a bit messed up load wise - is your computer running at 1 kWh per hour? For how long? (Yeah, that is confusing - but that would be the energy used to power a 220 volt, 4.5 amp load for an hour, every hour).

One of the confusing things with some of these units is kWh is a measure of energy, even though it has a time component in the name (kWh can be directly converted to joules). It isn’t ACTUALLY a measure of power (aka energy over time), even thought it implies it is because it has ‘hour’ in the name.

Power is energy over time.

So you have an absolute number for storage (your battery in this example can store 2.1kWh of energy - 2.1kWH is equivalent in energy to 2100 watts drawn out over an hour).

Your inverters, panels, chargers, etc. will be rated for a level of output POWER (energy over time) then will draw/convert that (say 4 or 8 kw) to/from the batteries. You can easily have an inverter that can draw down those batteries super fast (say will pull down 8kw continuous, so you’d get less than 15 minutes on that battery - if it doesn’t get damaged or explode), or one that draws power out slowly (say 200 watts max) to make it last 10 hours say.

Same with your chargers, etc.

You’re solar panels are almost certainly not rated in kWh, but kw- aka maximum instantaneous power they would be producing at any moment under ideal conditions, not aggregate energy they would be producing or storing over time. This is important because they don’t store power and actual energy production will depend on a lot of factors, like amount of time in the sun, etc.

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#125

Post by neohaven »

coder543 wrote: post #75
lazide wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, that really doesn’t make any sense. There is several missing factors here, and it’s a useless metric. Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well - based on discharge rate. It can also do 10 minutes - based on discharge rate. 100 hours is literally useless on it’s own because it doesn’t tell you anything concrete. 100 hours….. of what? It looks like a classic science writing article where they left all the impo…

> > You could do the same thing with Lithium Ion, it would just be cost prohibitive... 10x as expensive, supposedly. > Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well Did you reply to the wrong person? I already addressed your entire comment several different ways in my original comment, and you didn't address anything I wrote in mine, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm not the best at explaining things? > 100 hours... of what?…

That cost-effectiveness discussion was enlightening. I find you have a knack for explaining what people don't see, by the way.

Open question, which maybe you might have info about, I'm just curious if maybe anyone crossed something on this; I wonder if that characteristic is inherent to specific energy storage tech; for example in Li-Ion IMR/INR batteries, this might be in part because of the voltage sag and discharge characteristics? In other words, a battery that sagged less under load and had a flatter discharge curve would have a wider range of acceptable durations? For example : https://www.richtek.com/battery-management/img/battery-disch...

This graph gives a general idea of how battery performance degrades the more load you put on Li-Ion batteries, the kind in flashlights, vapes, etc. The ICR18650s of the world et al.. They are not great for energy storage, long term, frankly. The harder you discharge them, the more the voltage sags, requiring even harder discharge to maintain a proper power output, leading to more heat, and power loss in spiky demand conditions. Leaving them on but at low-power for a very long time seems to be more efficient, but by the time you hit that low of a power-delivery, they become less cost-effective, because you could do the same with a hydro plant, a reservoir, and pumps. Li-Ion batteries need management circuits, balanced charge, can be overcharged, can be drained 'till they turn into a brick. They're far from idealized batteries that discharge at all rates consistently at equal voltage all along their Wh rating. A Constant-Power drain on Li-Ion heats up and degrades way worse at low charge or low battery condition, etc.

In other words, kWh is never the be-all-end-all of energy storage. If you want long, sustained power in tiny sips, I'm pretty sure nothing beats these ZnO batteries for hearing aids that use oxygen (or is it air?) as fuel. What seems to really matter is the ability to push out kWh on a consistent basis is, as far as I can tell, and we have no really good solution for this?

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#126

Post by ksec »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #120
ksec wrote: post #116

Let's just assume this works as advertise, at less than 1/10th the cost of lithium-ion. And we can scale it to practically infinity. And available by 2023. What is left missing in the big picture for 100% clean, and renewable energy? As far as I can tell, Solar and Wind has already achieved cost/Wh lowered than all other form of energy and has a decent roadmap to further drive down the cost by another 50 - 60%. Or ar…

Storage is the last big scientific puzzle for doing it completely economically, yes. Thereafter it's "just" a matter of political will.

I was under the impression, let say inclusive of Storage, if Clean and Renewable energy are one third of the cost of Coal Nuclear or Gas. Then the incentive and market force will be so great no political will could stop it?

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#127

Post by amelius »

coder543 wrote: post #118
amelius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a term that summarizes many of the complex properties you mentioned. Ok, then would you be so kind to show how to compute these properties from this single term?

Would you be so kind as to show how to reverse a hash? A summary is like a hash; it throws away information deemed irrelevant to the task at hand, but it is still related to the input information. So, no, I won't show how to do that, because it's impossible, and I never claimed otherwise. I just love these "gotcha!" comments that pop up on HN so frequently. I'm having to explain what it means to summarize information…

I didn't ask for exact values, and never expected them.

But if you say "summary", then I'd expect at least to get some info in the right ballpark. Otherwise it is not a summary, but just some alternative bit of (possibly relevant) information.

Also, a hash is not a right analogy for a summary because typically hashes don't hold any bits of useful information, at least within reasonable computational limits.

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#128

Post by gumby »

Animats wrote: post #47
cogman10 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite a bit more promising than a lot of those projects. They are actually manufacturing the batteries for a battery plant. That's quite a bit further along than a lot of battery announcements are.

Can you buy a sample battery? The announcement is suspicious. "100 hours" is not a meaningful number for a battery. The numbers you want to hear are KWH/Kg, KWH/m^3, max charge and discharge rates, number of charge/discharge cycles before storage drops off, efficiency, and cost/KWH. "That project, announced in May last year, was originally due to be a 1MW/150MWh demonstration plant capable of outputting 1MW for 150 h…

Having worked in this sector I agree with everything you write, though I would add some qualifications:

For grid scale storage, kWh/kg and kwh/m3 (actually j/g and j/m^3) are, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant -- people aren't carrying power plants around, and grid scale investment is the classic Cap Ex/Op ex carry trade.

Also your $/kWh is an input to LCoS rather than a metric that can be used to make a judgement on its own; discouragingly, though LCoS is even mentioned in the article, it's only in a wavy.

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#129

Post by jeffbee »

iseanstevens wrote: post #66
jeffbee wrote: post #39

So, the article commits a pretty large error by describing this as the cheapest energy storage. This advance, even if we take a corporate press release at face value, only brings the cost down the the level of compressed gas storage. It's cheaper than lithium-ion but battery storage project costs, like most other utility projects, are dominated by infrastructure, land, regulatory costs, inverters, etc.

Any sources to site?

Annualized Cost and LCOE by Energy Storage Technology and Year, from https://www.pnnl.gov/ESGC-cost-performance

Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery

#130

Post by hinkley »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #119
hinkley wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started following battery tech at the turn of the century and this was old behavior even then. Battery prototypes are the moral equivalent of announcing you've found a new chemical that kills tumors - in vitro. Back then the advice from others watching battery technology? If their tech is 10 years ahead of the current state of the art, then either it will take them 10 years to produce it or they will produce it soo…

Why would anyone care at all about portability for grid storage? This makes no sense.

Why would anyone favor lithium ion for grid storage? Makes no sense. So if someone is comparing their product to something that makes no sense, they aren’t making sense.

Are they confused, or just lying?

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