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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

#41

Post by teruakohatu »

Meandering wrote: post #11

This is interesting... I hope they can make it feasible in the long run. There is another interesting application for this oxidation phenomenon.[1] They burn iron dust to create a C02-free furnace. Imagine replacing coal with iron in concrete plants... [1] https://newatlas.com/energy/bavarian-brewery-carbon-free-ren...

Iron ore reserves: 168.6 billion tonnes Coal reserves: 1055 billion tonnes.

Coal energy density: 6.7 kWh/kg [2] Iron Ore energy density: 1.4 kWh/kg [1]

Total iron ore energy reserves: ~236.04 billion kWh [3] Total coal energy reserves: ~ 7,068 billion kWh [4]

So as far as energy goes we have 30x as much coal energy.

Now the rust can be renewed with energy ... but you need the energy to renew it in the first place.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/iron-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal [3] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin... [4] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Coal_reserve

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

#42

Post by ummonk »

yissp wrote: post #37
Meandering wrote: post #11

This is interesting... I hope they can make it feasible in the long run. There is another interesting application for this oxidation phenomenon.[1] They burn iron dust to create a C02-free furnace. Imagine replacing coal with iron in concrete plants... [1] https://newatlas.com/energy/bavarian-brewery-carbon-free-ren...

Is iron abundant enough for this to scale? Maybe this could kickstart the asteroid mining industry.

The earth is made out of iron. There is no point in mining it in space, and regardless anything mines in space would be far too expensive for a use like this, which is why the main prospects for asteroid mining are precious metals.

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

#44

Post by hamandcheese »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #24
philipkglass wrote: post #10

Wiley said that a 300MW “pilot” project for Minnesota-based Great River Energy will be commissioned in 2023. That project, announced in May last year, was originally due to be a 1MW/150MWh demonstration plant capable of outputting 1MW for 150 hours straight. If the energy had gone up 300x from the originally announced pilot project the same way the power did, this would be a huge storage project boasting 45,000 MWh o…

To address slow charging, could you have an array of them, some charging and some discharging? But you would need maybe 7x more then, so they would need to be 7x cheaper to compete. (Not quite sure how the math works out to account for charge rates and weather.)

For that matter, why not have 7x the batteries at 1/7 the capacity? Or does the charge rate not depend on the capacity?

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

#45

Post by tiddelypom »

ummonk wrote: post #43
lovemenot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operating cash will be held in a trust called the Form Energy Offset Organisation.

I bet their IT team uses Rust.

Hehe maybe we should start. (We're a python shop though.)

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

#47

Post by Animats »

cogman10 wrote: post #17
2sk21 wrote: post #9

“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale

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 hours straight" hints that the discharge rate may be very low.

Previous work [2] indicates serious limits on charge/discharge cycles. Like 20-30 cycles.

[2] https://phys.org/news/2017-11-renaissance-iron-air-battery.h...

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

#48

Post by montecarl »

yissp wrote: post #37
Meandering wrote: post #11

This is interesting... I hope they can make it feasible in the long run. There is another interesting application for this oxidation phenomenon.[1] They burn iron dust to create a C02-free furnace. Imagine replacing coal with iron in concrete plants... [1] https://newatlas.com/energy/bavarian-brewery-carbon-free-ren...

Is iron abundant enough for this to scale? Maybe this could kickstart the asteroid mining industry.

Iron is the 4th most abundant element in Earth's crust. There are almost 3000 times more iron atoms than lithium atoms.

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

#49

Post by Meandering »

yissp wrote: post #37
Meandering wrote: post #11

This is interesting... I hope they can make it feasible in the long run. There is another interesting application for this oxidation phenomenon.[1] They burn iron dust to create a C02-free furnace. Imagine replacing coal with iron in concrete plants... [1] https://newatlas.com/energy/bavarian-brewery-carbon-free-ren...

Is iron abundant enough for this to scale? Maybe this could kickstart the asteroid mining industry.

You would use a fixed amount of iron and recycle it. It's not like you need "fresh" iron for every use.

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

#50

Post by coder543 »

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…

> "100 hours" is not a meaningful number for a battery.

It is a meaningful number... in the grid scale energy storage market. It's a term that summarizes many of the complex properties you mentioned. For a given energy storage technology, there is a certain duration that it tends to be most effective at. For traditional lithium ion batteries, that duration is about 4 hours. If you want to use lithium ion storage for longer durations than that, then you're making substantial sacrifices in cost effectiveness, utilization rate, etc.

Obviously one of the huge areas of research is long duration energy storage, to smooth over energy availability fluctuations that last weeks or months. Some might argue that Form Energy is addressing medium duration energy storage, and there isn't really any technology suited for true long duration energy storage yet.

If Form Energy's technology works out, then they're saying they've developed a battery technology that is 10x more cost effective than lithium ion on a per kWh basis, but that the technology cannot discharge as quickly as lithium ion, which makes it better suited for medium duration energy storage. You could do the same thing with Lithium Ion, it would just be cost prohibitive... 10x as expensive, supposedly.

What I've shared above is my understanding from following lots of news about green energy tech for years now, but I'm not an expert who can answer a bunch of additional questions... but your comment about 100 hours not being a meaningful number isn't accurate. It is meaningful to the target audience.

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