One of the biggest challenges for building an electricity system based entirely on renewable has been the problem of what to do to protect the system in the rare situation where a big transmission line goes down or a big source of generation is suddenly taken off-line or in shifting energy from season to season.  Smoothing out the daily mismatches between supply and demand seems now to be on the way to a workable solution with some combination of storage lasting up to 4 hours and more extensive load management.  Providing reliable 100-hour energy storage has been more of a problem.  The current solution is to keep an inventory of conventional fossil-fuel fired plants at the ready, perhaps with some on-site stored liquid renewable fuel to offset the use of fossil-fuels as much as possible.  That solution seems inherently unsatisfying since it can continue the burning of fossil natural gas. 

Now two companies have stepped forward with some interesting alternatives—one based on rust and one based on compressing carbon dioxide.  The question is whether these are going to be able to meet the claims being made as reasonable solutions.

Form Energy is well-along in developing its iron-air battery system which works by cycling iron from a metallic form to an oxidized form (better known as rust).   It has raised $818 million from investors, with $450 million in its Series E in October.  That’s a whopping amount considering they are only a 12-person company and haven’t yet done a commercial demo at scale, with one planned in 2023 with Great River Energy in Massachusetts (1 MW discharge capacity and 150 MWh of total stored energy).  Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are big fans and investors.  With all that investor enthusiasm, is this the big breakthrough everyone is hoping for?

Iron-air batteries are not a new idea.  NASA was interested in them in the 1960s.  They certainly used cheap materials, but cycle life was a problem, with only 20-50 cycles being achieved.  Form Energy says it has conquered that problem with a system that should be good for 5000 cycles.  Their primary innovation is a “proton pump” which efficiently replenishes protons (hydrogen ions) back into the electrolyte.  They also have relatively low power and energy density, which means no one should expect to see them in cars.  But for long-duration storage at a fixed site, they could be very attractive.  They are aiming for an 85% round-trip efficiency, but apparently are not there yet.  If you want more technical detail, delivered in a fun way, go to Matt Ferrell’s site “Undecided” when he covered Form Energy.  You can read a critical look at the system in this article.

Form Energy claims their solution will be 1/10th the cost of lithium ion storage in terms of $/kWh.  Their target is $20/kWh of capacity but of course lithium-ion costs are still coming down as well.  They readily admit this will only occur “at scale” and scale is what they are trying to achieve.  They have done only relatively small-scale tests at this point.  The $818 million is going to optimizing a manufacturing process and doing stress testing to assure the long-life of systems.  Lots of finger crossing going on.  It feels a bit like a “Hail Mary” with everything riding on the 2023 demo.

The second is a system developed by Italian company Energy Dome that cycles carbon dioxide from a liquid to a gas and back again, using the pressure of the vaporized carbon dioxide to spin a turbine-generator.  There are no technology advances involved.  It is an application of existing technology.  The idea is like Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) systems, but with a twist.  

To get the most out of CAES requires liquefying air to get the best energy density.  However, that requires cryogenic temperatures which require a lot of energy to reach.  Carbon dioxide liquefies at room temperature with the application of about 1000 psi in pressure.  That’s not all that much—nowhere near the 5,000-10,000 psi planned for use in gaseous hydrogen storage, for example.

Energy Dome works by storing liquefied carbon dioxide in a series of small high-pressure tanks and then extracting the energy by heating and expanding the gas through a turbine that powers a generator.  The liquid expands about 600-fold in volume.  The expanded gas goes into a big “bag” that looks like a blimp sitting on the ground.  The carbon dioxide is at atmospheric pressure, so the blimp doesn’t have to be very strong.  To recharge the system, the carbon dioxide is taken into the turbine-generator working in reverse—the generator becomes a motor and the turbine becomes a compressor.  

There are some important details.  Compressing the gas heats it up.  The gas needs to be cooled back to room temperature to get the carbon dioxide to liquefy.  In reverse, heat is needed to get the liquid to evaporate quickly.  Energy Dome stores hot and cold fluid to reduce the use of on-site energy to do these two functions.  Still the system is more of an energy user than the Form Energy battery, reflected in the 75-80% round-trip efficiency that Energy Dome is targeting.

The primary question with Energy Dome is about cost, not technology.  The system requires a lot plumbing, tanks, valves, turbines, etc.  While all those are commodity products with known costs, it is the total cost of the system as installed that is important.  Energy Dome has partnered with a major European wind farm company, Ørsted.  The plan is to build a 20 MW system with 10 hours of storage and have it operational in 2024.  Expanding to 100 hours duration is just a matter of adding more pressurized tanks and more “blimps” to the existing compression/expansion equipment.  The 2024 demo will be key to seeing whether cost can be contained enough to make this a reasonable solution.

Form Energy is certainly winning the enthusiasm from clean tech investors.  Still it has a lot to prove about its technology and about its costs.  Energy Dome needs to contain its capital costs.  Maybe both will work out.  We’ll come back to this next year.

Among many things, the inflation reduction act (IRA) is a big investment into our domestic battery production.  To get the details, you can read about the IRA from Moss Adams here. 

Here is what has us the most excited:

• The establishment of a $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for the Environmental Protection Agency to allocate towards emissions reductions projects. 
• $250 Billion in Energy Infrastructure Loan Guarantees
• $40 Billion in Clean Energy Loan Guarantees
• The multitude of guarantees and incentives to build domestic battery capacity

We will cover more later, but right now I want to highlight how the EV incentive may drive investment and innovation in domestic battery production. The requirements for batteries in EVs lead to increasing investment in innovation. There are two parts.

1. Battery materials must be sourced in the United States or a country that has a free trader agreement with the United States.
2. Batteries must be assembled in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. 

This will limit what Electric Vehicles qualify for the incentive, but it won’t eliminate them. 

Batteries qualify by having a certain percentage (escalating over time) meet the requirements. There is no clarity on the requirements currently. Everyone is waiting on the Department of Transportation and the Treasury to make the final rules. Whatever they end up being, there is likely not enough capacity for materials and assembly to meet the potential demand. With high demand and shortages of materials, there will be investment to expand supply and innovation to increase efficiency/ reduce cost. Innovation in battery design and manufacturing should boom. The IRA is providing over $100 Billion in loans to speed up the transition. 

We have talked about Battery Advancements in the past. Now, we hope to see these advancements make it to the practical world.

New battery design, and chemistry are where I am excited about innovation. So far in the US there have been over% 15 Billion committed to building domestic capacity.  PEM Motion has a good Battery Atlas for Europe here. Over the past year, there were major investments by vehicle OEMs Tesla, Toyota, GM, Ford, and VW to build domestic battery capacity. They are partnering with major battery companies like SK Industrials, and LG Chem, who are also building plants of their own. Most analysts think this is not enough and we may need up to $100 Billion in battery manufacturing. With that amount of investment, slight improvements in battery design and manufacturing go a long way. Even with two Giga factories, Tesla is looking at investing $10 Billion more to keep their advantage.  

While the energy transition increases demand for storage, the investment from the IRA should get us ahead, increasing competition and building needed capacity.

A Rancho Cordova-based innovator is poised to make a big contribution to lowering lithium ion battery costs and improving their performance.  LiCAP Technologies is working on an “activated dry electrode” that is significantly better than the wet slurries now used.  Wet coating is energy-intensive, time consuming, and uses a highly toxic solvent, plus it creates a fair amount of waste.  LiCAP is addressing all those flaws and getting lots of attention from an industry looking for a better technology.

LiCAP’s CEO Linda Zhong left ultra-capacitor manufacturer Maxwell Technologies in 2011 to pursue her ideas for dry electrodes.  Her first venture was EnerTrode in Hayward, and in 2016 that morphed into LiCAP when she moved to Sacramento.   Her goal is to revolutionize the fabrication of batteries at dramatically lower costs.  Almost half of the energy needs for a Giga-scale battery manufacturing plant are associated with the industry-standard electrode manufacturing methods.  Zhong is convinced her innovation could do much better.

However, in order to get a revenue stream started as soon as possible, LiCAP started with the manufacture of ultra-capacitors.  Capacitors are simpler and easier to make than batteries.  A capacitor consists of an anode and cathode separated by a dielectric material which prevents the accumulated charge from jumping the gap between the electrodes.  The key to lower cost is to make the various layers as thin as possible so more material can be stuffed into a small space.  LiCAP’s innovation is using an activated carbon membrane that is 100 microns or less thick, yet quite strong.  The conventional wet process inherently makes much thicker electrodes.  

Zhong’s long-time business partner Martin Zea has been inventing their own production process and machines to make rolls of material at 100 meters per minute, faster than any competitor.  The rolls are sent to LiCAP’s ultra-capacitor assembly plant in Tianjin, China, for now.  In 2016, the China government lavished help on anyone wanting to set up enterprises such as this, and that gave LiCAP an important kickstart.  Now, the company is making millions of dollars of sales per year, with about 40 employees in its local plant.

Dry electrodes have been getting a lot of attention in the market, and LiCAP may have the lead in making them practical.  They are smaller, with higher energy and power densities than any other.  Super-caps and ultra-caps are used in a lot of products, notably in some EVs to provide near-instantaneous injections of power and energy with very fast recharge times.  They are also used in medical equipment, industrial machinery, and consumer electronics to protect against short losses of power or power spikes, or providing an important boost.  As their product’s capacity increases they are getting increasing attention for grid support.  One interesting LiCAP product is a drop-in replacement for the batteries used in wind turbines to adjust the pitch of the blades as they start to rotate.  This kind of high-power draw is murder on batteries, but perfect for ultra-caps that then can last 10-15 years compared to 2-3 years for batteries.  They may also become important to backstop ultrafast charging stations.  Advertisements for LiCAP now routinely pop up on technology sites and in publications.

But batteries are an even bigger market.  Zhong sees that market as her ultimate goal and the one most likely to take her company past the billion-dollar mark.  Katharina Gerber has been added to the team in the last year as the Director of Business Development to accelerate the sales and strategic partnerships.  LiCAP has been hosting a couple dozen of interested partners and customers this year as word of their new material has spread.  They have added a process development area at their facility, which is doing batches of material for batteries, working out the kinks.  They hope to have a continuous process in operation soon to start making batteries and getting them to market to increase their impact.

Since beginning the ultracap assembly plant in Tianjing, doing business in China has become more difficult.  Zhong now wants to keep the manufacture of the membranes and final assembly in the US, especially with the new IRA law limiting the most generous EV incentives for buyers to those vehicles with a significant fraction of all content coming from the US and North America.  

To get to a bigger scale and to build the battery-manufacturing process line, LiCAP will need to find an investment of $25+ million.  They hope this will be enough to convince more of the skeptics that they meet the requirements of big orders with a high-quality product that meets all the performance measures.  Then Zhong believes they will be able to make the leap to Giga-scale either through an alliance with an established battery manufacturer or on its own. 

The CEO has been very quiet about this company and few people even know about it.  Will it be the next clean tech unicorn in our region?  Linda Zhong is very determined to do just that.