A team of MIT researchers has figured out a way to create a supercapacitor simply by mixing cement, the binding ingredient of concrete, and a fine charcoal product called carbon black together with water.

Better yet, this mixture could allow a home to store a full day's worth of energy in its foundation, potentially paving the way to an efficient renewable energy storage solution that doesn't rely on mining rare Earth metals.

Petroleum producers know that there are not many opportunities to make major new discoveries so they are focused on maintaining their current production levels. In many cases, there is a growing supply of unused capital waiting for an appropriate place to invest.

Oil executives would be wise to consider investing their human and financial resources in nuclear reactors, which can be considered to be modern, near zero emission energy wells. When nuclear reactors are used as advanced heat sources to produce synthetic fuels and hydrocarbons, a substantial portion of the capital infrastructure and core competencies are directly transferrable from the conventional petroleum industry. //

Fossil fuel companies have the necessary assets to make successful investments in nuclear energy wells. They can raise capital from investors that are comfortable with risk, work their way through the regulatory wickets, buy the steel and concrete, develop the necessary agreements with local governments and ensure that their suppliers meet exacting specifications. They live and breathe safety based on long experience with massive quantities of volatile materials. After their new energy wells begin operation, they can look forward to many decades worth of reliable production and sales – energy is not a fad and people will always find new ways to use whatever quantity is available.

Sea-going or floating nuclear plants are especially well-matched to the current infrastructure and skill set of fossil fuel companies. They will be produced in the same shipyards that currently produce off-shore platforms, tankers, support vessels, and barges. In some cases, the production platforms will closely resemble floating petroleum or natural gas processing plants.

There are increasing pressures on fossil fuel companies to slow or stop their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel companies can legitimately meet their fiduciary responsibility to maximize their investor returns by directing their capital budgets to a new generation of energy production and distribution capability.

That new energy production capacity should include:

• Systems using heavy metal fission to directly supply heat and power
• Installations that use fission to produce heat and power for synthetic fuel production that combines hydrogen from water and carbon that is captured from the atmosphere.

At Nucleation Capital, we are focused on investing in advanced nuclear energy, synthetic fuels and macro energy integration systems that can all help decarbonize our energy and power sources. The transition from hydrocarbons to clean energy will be challenging, but nuclear energy investments will enable its success with lower costs than attempting to complete the transition without nuclear energy.

The other part of the fiction about E cars is that batteries are made with a massive amount of raw material, mined by diesel-driven equipment, and slave labor.

Notwithstanding the dream that E-Cars are produced in Santa’s magic workshop, they are not. All of the raw minerals and elements needed for EV batteries are strip-mined. Liberals happily drive their E cars while scolding truck drivers, almost certainly never consider the environmental and human cost of the battery powered “clean vehicles.” Almost all of the known deposits of cobalt are found in the Congo. Slaves/Child laborers harvest those raw materials. The conditions for miners range from horrid to barely humane.

China has the corner on graphite and lithium. America will import almost all of its lithium and 100 percent of its graphite from Communist China to make E-Car batteries. How does the CCP get those elements out of the ground? Thank a Uyghur slave. China employs hundreds if not thousands in the forced labor of minerals. The mining giant Xinjiang Nonferrous Metal Industry works hundreds of Uyghurs in its mines. EV car? Thank a slave.

The batteries tested include the Duracell, Energizer, Amazon Basics, Harbor Freight Thunderbolt, Duracell Quantum, Dollar Store, Rayovac, Eveready, and Energizer Lithium.

Energizer Lithium = 3300mAH @ 300mA
Energizer = 1800mAH @ 300mA

mAH per penny = Amazon Basics 1st, Energizer, Rayovac & Eveready Silver 2nd

10 brands of rechargeable batteries tested for nearly a year. Additional set of rechargeable batteries tested for shelf life (battery self-discharge) after nearly a year. Initial voltage, internal resistance, and milliamp hour capacity tested. Brands: Panasonic Eneloop, Amazon Basics Silver and Black, EBL, Rayovac, PowerEx, Harbor Freight Thunderbolt, IKEA LADDA, Duracell, and Energizer.

mAh after 300 charge/discharge cycles:

• IKEA Ladda 2450 = 2017 mAh
• Duracell 2450 = 2007 mAh
• Silver Amazon Basics 2400 = 1864 mAh
• Black Amazon Basics 1900 = 1526 mAh
• Eneloop 1900 = 1400 mAh

Internal Resistance:

• IKEA Ladda = 70u Ohms
• Duracall = 71
• Eneloop = 78

IKEA Ladda: https://amzn.to/3j43iz6

Charger/Tester: Powerex MH-C9000
Testing internal resistance: Opus BT-C3400 Charger

Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.

The Chinese company didn't steal this technology. It was given to them — by the U.S. Department of Energy. First in 2017, as part of a sublicense, and later, in 2021, as part of a license transfer. An investigation by NPR and the Northwest News Network found the federal agency allowed the technology and jobs to move overseas, violating its own licensing rules while failing to intervene on behalf of U.S. workers in multiple instances. //

Department of Energy officials declined NPR's request for an interview to explain how the technology that cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars ended up in China. After NPR sent department officials written questions outlining the timeline of events, the federal agency terminated the license with the Chinese company, Dalian Rongke Power Co. Ltd. //

Forever Energy, a Bellevue, Wash., based company, is one of several U.S. companies that have been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries. Joanne Skievaski, Forever Energy's chief financial officer, has been trying to get hold of a license for more than a year and called the department's decision to allow foreign manufacturing "mind boggling." //

The idea for this vanadium redox battery began in the basement of a government lab, three hours southeast of Seattle, called Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It was 2006, and more than two dozen scientists began to suspect that a special mix of acid and electrolyte could hold unusual amounts of energy without degrading. They turned out to be right.

It took six years and more than 15 million taxpayer dollars for the scientists to uncover what they believed was the perfect vanadium battery recipe. Others had made similar batteries with vanadium, but this mix was twice as powerful and did not appear to degrade the way cellphone batteries or even car batteries do. The researchers found the batteries capable of charging and recharging for as long as 30 years.

Work has been completed on the largest battery energy storage system (BESS) to have been paired with solar PV to date, with utility Florida Power & Light (FPL) holding a ceremony earlier this week.

Construction on the Manatee Energy Storage Center in Florida’s Manatee County was completed in just 10 months, having begun in February this year. The 409MW / 900MWh BESS is colocated with FPL’s existing 74.5MW Manatee Solar Energy Center ground-mounted PV plant.

Allowing solar energy to be used in evenings and at night or on cloudy days, the utility company — a subsidiary of electric utility holding company NextEra Energy — has placed 132 battery containers onto a 40-acre plot of land.

The BESS will charge at off-peak times with abundant solar energy and then discharge to the local grid at peak times, when power is most expensive and often at its most carbon intensive.

It will reduce the runtime of local fossil fuel power plants and will aid FPL in a plan to ease two 1970s-era natural gas power plants totalling more than 1,600MWh into retirement.

California’s largest VRFB project to date, supplied by Japan’s Sumitomo Electric Industries (SEI), has been participating in wholesale market opportunities since 2018. Image: SDG&E / Ted Walton.
Four new grid-scale battery energy storage projects have been announced by California energy supplier Central Coast Community Energy (CCCE), including three long-duration flow battery projects.

CCCE, one of the US state’s community choice aggregator (CCA) energy supplier groups, said it has selected the projects in response to a request for proposals (RfP) it issued in June. In total, 21 proposals from 16 developers were submitted and two more energy storage projects are still being considered along with the announced four.

In what could be the biggest utility procurement of the technology so far in the world, vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) systems with eight-hour storage duration will be built ranging in size from 6MW / 18MWh to 16MW / 128MWh, together with a four-hour lithium-ion battery system. CCCE gave an estimated date of 2026 for all of the approved projects to be operational.

Energy storage can change electricity’s status as the ultimate ‘just-in-time’ product, where supply and use have to be matched in real-time, but this won’t be possible without increasingly sophisticated software solutions.

Four industry representatives with expertise in software spoke last week at an energy storage event hosted online by Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of global investment and advisory services firm Guggenheim Partners.

The introduction of scalable energy storage solutions is a new fundamental technical capability in electricity, the first time — with the exception of limited quantities of pumped hydro energy storage —that the model has been changed in over 100 years, Larsh Johnson, CTO of distributed energy storage company Stem Inc said.

Software enables that new storage, mostly from lithium-ion batteries, to react quickly, flexibly and be adaptable to changing market conditions, Johnson said. At the same time, more and more variable wind and solar resources are coming onto grids all over the world, requiring integration and balancing.

The energy industry has to deliver instantly and can’t always count on suppliers. Johnson compared the predicament to what online retail giant Amazon faced when rolling out its Amazon Prime Plus subscription model.

Amazon, he said, solved its problems with massive software investments. That software is underwritten by artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts customers’ future needs and behaviour while also projecting the retailer’s own supply and delivery constraints. Thus ensuring marketplace inventory and on-time deliveries.

“It’s the same with directing resources into real-time power markets,” the Stem CTO said.

Energy storage can provide workarounds to what Johnson called “some rigid power grid situations,” allowing energy to be flexibly transacted when it’s needed.

Not only that, but software is adaptable. With regulators and policymakers under continuous pressure to evolve their market design rules governing energy assets that may have useful lifetimes decades long, software can help shape those rules too.

Ben Irons, founder of Habitat Energy, a company specialising in software-backed optimisation of energy storage and renewable energy assets in markets including the UK, Australia and Texas, noted that “there’s no other traded commodity where you would see low prices every evening and high prices every night,” without seeing arbitrage and traders spotting the opportunity to trade.

Energy storage has revolutionised that, Irons said, adding that even five years ago, there weren’t “physical assets that could store electrical power in an efficient way at a reasonable price” the way lithium-ion can.

Australian startup Gelion is seeking to commercialize a non-flow zinc-bromide battery based on a stable gel replacing a flowing electrolyte. According to the manufacturer, the device is safe, robust and recyclable. //

but when the company began its deep design studies with an undisclosed global partner during the pandemic, it arrived at the conclusion the smartest way to commercialize the Endure battery would be to switch the design to a parallel plate lead-acid format.

The battery is described as suitable for for irrigation, water purification and desalination systems, remote communities, mining facilities and agriculture.

Two things preceded this decision. The first was the complexity of building new manufacturing capability, and the second was the fact access to capital for such an endeavor is effectively hamstrung in Australia due to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s rules.

“If you want to produce something in a factory here, you need to have a factory reference plant the same size or bigger that has been operating for two years and that allows you to have full emissions data of the factory. That means you can never build a new factory here for new technology because you’ve got to prove it somewhere and you can’t prove it here,” said Maschmeyer. “If you can hook onto something that already exists, it’s much better …"

SB Energy Corp., a U.S. renewable-energy firm that’s an arm of Japan’s SoftBank Group, is making a record purchase of the batteries manufactured by Energy Storage Systems. The Oregon company says it has new technology that can store renewable energy for longer and help overcome some of the reliability problems that have caused blackouts in California and record-high energy prices in Europe.

The units, which rely on something called “iron-flow chemistry,” will be used in utility-scale solar projects dotted across the U.S., allowing those power plants to provide electricity for hours after the sun sets. //

The battery is made of iron salt and water,” said Hossfeld. “Unlike lithium-ion batteries, iron flow batteries are really cheap to manufacture.”

Every battery has four components: two electrodes between which charged particles shuffle as the battery is charged and discharged, electrolyte that allows the particles to flow smoothly and a separator that prevents the two electrodes from forming a short circuit.

Flow batteries, however, look nothing like the battery inside smartphones or electric cars. That’s because the electrolyte needs to be physically moved using pumps as the battery charges or discharges. That makes these batteries large, with ESS’s main product sold inside a shipping container.

What they take up in space, they can make up in cost. Lithium-ion batteries for grid-scale storage can cost as much as $350 per kilowatt-hour. But ESS says its battery could cost $200 per kWh or less by 2025.

“Battery technology hasn’t changed in over 30 years,” Moshiel Biton, CEO of electric car battery startup Addionics, tells ISRAEL21c.

And here is where Biton saw a huge opportunity “as trillions of dollars will continue to be invested in creating better batteries.” //

Addionics aims to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing a relatively small change into how batteries are designed.

Unlike other companies that focus on improving battery chemistry, Addionics is focused on the physics of a specific part of the battery, the electric current collector.

The current collector serves as the substrate of a battery’s electrodes. These small metal sheets, not dissimilar to aluminum foil, are layered around the “active material” – lithium ion, for example. //

“Using nanotechnology, we can find space that’s not well utilized and make it more efficient,” Biton says.

“That way we get more active material in the same space, which increases the range by keeping the contact between the metal and the active material very high while minimizing internal resistance, enabling higher currents.”

Solar energy can be stored by converting it into hydrogen using hematite. //

Researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have made a scientific breakthrough on the storage of solar energy, as reported by Energy & Environmental Science. A project led by Professor Avner Rothschild of the Technion's Faculty of Materials Science doctoral student Yifat Piekner from the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP has shown that hematite can serve as a promising material in converting solar energy into hydrogen.

The process entails the use of photoelectrochemical solar cells, which are similar to photovoltaic cells, but instead of producing electricity, they produce hydrogen using the electric power (current × voltage) generated in them. The power then uses sunlight energy to dissociate water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Hydrogen is easy to store and when used as fuel, does not involve greenhouse gas or carbon emissions.

Because you can't sell cars that have a 1 in 150 chance of randomly going boom.

• A Tesla Megapack fire at the Victorian Big Battery in Southeast Australia was brought under control Monday afternoon.
• Results of the investigation will be closely watched, and could influence the way such systems are designed and built, according to Paul Christensen, a professor of electrochemistry at Newcastle University whose research focuses on lithium ion battery fires and safety.
• His recommendations include monitors within the systems, and enough space for fire crews to maneuver and aim a hose. //

Christensen also said these systems should be designed to allow space for first responders to maneuver around and aim a hose. Plenty of water should available on site, with enough hydrants installed. Containers would ideally have "dead pipes" that are capped and stick out, allowing firefighters to connect a hose, then step away and flood the container to extinguish the flames from a safe distance.

At the moment, water remains the best way to suppress a fire in any lithium ion battery energy storage system //

The Tesla Megapack fire first occurred within the 300 megawatt (450 megawatt hours) system in Geelong, Victoria starting Friday morning. More than 30 fire trucks and support vehicles and about 150 fire fighters from the CFA and local Fire Rescue Victoria responded, containing the flames so they only affected two Megapacks of the approximately 210 that make up the system. //

There have been around 40 known fires that have occurred within large-scale, lithium ion battery energy storage systems, according to Christensen's research. Those incidents, most of which occurred in the past three years, date back to 2012, and include four fires at three facilities in the U.S. in Arizona, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Molten salt batteries shape as a more cost-effective solution, which use electrodes kept in a molten state with the help of high temperatures. This is something that the Sandia scientists have been working to change. //

"We've been working to bring the operating temperature of molten sodium batteries down as low as physically possible," says Leo Small, the lead researcher on the project. "There's a whole cascading cost savings that comes along with lowering the battery temperature. You can use less expensive materials. The batteries need less insulation and the wiring that connects all the batteries can be a lot thinner."

In their commercial form, these batteries are known as sodium-sulfur batteries, and a few of these have been developed around the world but generally operate at 520 to 660 °F (270 to 350 °C). The Sandia team have set their sights much lower, although doing so required a rethink as the chemistries that work at high temperatures don't lend themselves well to lower temperatures.

The scientists' design consists of liquid sodium metal that sits on the opposite side of a ceramic separator material to a novel liquid mixture made of sodium iodide and gallium chloride, which the scientists call a catholyte. When the battery discharges energy, chemical reactions take place that produces sodium ions and electrons that pass through the highly-selective separator material and produce molten iodide salt on the other side. //

This sodium-sulfur battery proved capable of operating at just 230 °F (110 °C), and proved its worth across eight months of testing in the lab through which it was charged and discharged more than 400 times. Further, it runs at 3.6 volts, which the scientists say is around 40 percent higher than commercially available molten salt batteries. This could equate to versions with fewer cells and therefore a higher energy density.

German storage system manufacturer Sonnen has published test results that indicate the longevity of its products after extended use. In laboratory tests, the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells, which are also used in the company's “solar battery,” reportedly withstood 28,000 charging cycles.

The lifespans of battery storage systems remain an issue for many potential buyers. Sonnen says that it has charged and discharged battery cells at a C rate of one and a depth of discharge of 100% over a period of eight years. This means that a full charge or discharge was completed within an hour. It noted that the test for the batteries was significantly more demanding than its use as a residential storage system.

Over the past few years, it has carried out tests in a laboratory operated by Sonnen in Wildpoldsried, Germany. According to the manufacturer, the iron phosphate battery cells still had 65% of their original capacity. As a result, the cells have not yet reached the end of their lifespans, because for this there must be a sudden drop in capacity, the manufacturer explained.

The bet that StoreDot is making is that it's not the absolute charge range of an electric vehicle that matters; it's how quickly you can extend that range. So, while it's leveraging research on technologies that allow greater capacity in lithium-ion batteries, it's turning around and sacrificing some of that capacity in order to make charging faster.

Put differently, the bet is that people would rather add 300km to the range of their car in five minutes than have a car with a 600km range that takes an hour to fully charge.

A company from Australia called Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) has announced some interesting test results from aluminum-ion battery testing. This new type of rechargeable battery can charge ten times faster than current lithium-ion units. While charging significantly faster, the new battery type also lasts longer and doesn’t require a cooling system to operate. //

The company has been testing coin cell prototypes of the aluminum-ion battery ahead of delivering them to manufacturing partners and has disclosed some performance figures. The battery offers a power density of around 7000 W/kg, which is a massive amount of power closing in on the power density provided by ultracapacitors capable of 12,000-14,000 W/kg.

The new type of battery has an energy density of 150-160 Wh/kg, which is about 60 percent of the energy per weight of the best lithium-ion batteries available today. That spec means these batteries aren’t well-suited to electric vehicles at first glance. //

The batteries can charge extremely fast, with GMG saying that a smartphone running an aluminum-ion battery could charge fully in one to five minutes. What that would mean if aluminum-ion batteries were used in an electric vehicle is that it would only drive about 60 percent the distance of a comparable vehicle with the lithium-ion battery, but its charge speed may be so fast less driving range wouldn’t matter.

For a home or business, the economics of installing battery storage are often challenging. While falling costs are gradually improving one end of the equation, a new study led by Stefan Englberger at the Technical University of Munich highlights the other side of the balance—optimizing the financial benefits.