Iron-based technologies join the energy storage fray
Batteries based on iron chemistry "may be up to the task" of providing cheap energy storage for hours or even days at a time, says MIT's prestigious MIT Technology Review.
The review selected iron-based batteries as one of 10 breakthrough technologies for 2022, along with a malaria vaccine and nuclear fusion reactors. It cited two iron-based battery manufacturers, ESS and Form Energy, which are commercializing products in this area.
Both companies received funding from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures investment fund. The Oregon-based ESS has batteries that provide up to 12 hours of power and have been sold around the world.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts-based Form Energy aims to produce batteries with a discharge time of up to 100 hours. It lags behind ESS in commercialization, and the first megawatt-scale pilot plant won't be operational until next year.
However, even 12 hours is significantly longer than what is currently obtainable with market-leading lithium-ion batteries. Although almost all grid-connected battery systems today use lithium-ion batteries, the technology still struggles to provide more than about 4 hours of power. This is because the capacity of a lithium-ion battery depends on the number of cells it has. Since each battery costs the same, the cost of a battery grows steadily in proportion to the required storage capacity.
At today's prices, it's very expensive to build a lithium-ion battery that can provide several megawatts of power for more than four hours. Although lithium-ion battery prices have fallen sharply in recent years, the pace of cost reductions has stalled.
Analyst firm Wood Mackenzie expects global lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity to increase fivefold by 2030, but four-fifths of those batteries will be used in electric vehicles.
At the same time, the growing demand for lithium-ion batteries has led to an increase in the cost of the raw materials required for them. The price of lithium carbonate, for example, has risen fivefold in the last year.
The price of cobalt, another key element in many lithium-ion batteries, has risen to its highest level in nearly four years. Iron-based batteries can avoid these pricing issues in two ways.
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