How salt and sand could replace lithium batteries
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- The lithium-ion battery has powered us for decades. But for a renewable future, we need a new solution-and fast. So what are our options?
CORRECTION: In the video, at 05:40, we say lithium-ion batteries can only store energy for under four hours. This is incorrect. Four hours is the discharge duration that is currently economically viable.
Reporter: Beina Xu
Video Editor: Tomas Rosenberg
Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world - and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
#PlanetA #Lithium #Battery
Read more:
The future of energy storage: energy.mit.edu/wp-content/upl...
Projections of energy storage technology: www.nrel.gov/analysis/storage...
Power storage technology, using sand and engineered materials: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
IEA Electricity Market Report: www.iea.org/reports/electrici...
IEA Energy Storage Report: www.iea.org/reports/energy-st...
Costs and markets to 2030: www.irena.org/publications/20...
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:49 The lithium-ion battery
02:33 Hydro
03:46 Sodium-ion
05:00 Thermal heat
07:11 The future
Did you know about all these different kinds of batteries? Which surprised you the most?
Salz und Sand. Sie sind überall und das ist großartig.
Loved what Malta is doing with molten salt. It's on another level!
Sodium is not prone to blowing up?? You might want to confirm that lol.
It is extremely explosive when exposed to water.
@@off_mah_lawn2074 only if it's pure Sodium.
I have heard about most of them from Matt Ferrell's channel and Dave Borlace at Just Have a Think. You didn't mention the iron air batteries tho lol or co2 batteries, or Compressed air batteries, there are loads of them some real wacky ones and some with real potential. I think in time sodium can overtake li-ion batteries on cost and energy density. it will just take time and money. just like li-ion has had 30 years to get where it is now.
Terrible inaccuracy at 5:30 - 5:50. They said the molten salt storage can store energy for 6 hrs but lithium only for 4 hrs. But lithium can store energy for months with little loss if you wanted it to. 4 hours is the time frame that they make the most profit out of it typically. It's purely economics that sets that time frame, not physics.
I don't think they really didn't explain that very well. Lithium batteries can put out a high capacity energy source for 4 hours from start of discharge to end. Obviously you could double the pack and get 8 hours but they're not typically used like that.
Isn't it because of its risk of blowing up?
@@sr.antipiro8669 with newer battery management systems, blowing up is more a thing of the past
yeah I thought that was odd. I've got several lithium batteries that I may charge and use periodically over months before recharging.
It's actually the opposite of what they were implying. The molten salt has to be used within 6 hours of being charged because it loses heat to the atmosphere if left too long. 6 hours is the maximum charged til discharged time. With lithium batteries you can charge them, then wait as long as you want, then discharge them. 4 hours is the discharge duration. But this is not the maximum duration as implied by the video, it is the minimum duration! Storage facilities are built with a certain storage capacity and maximum power output. The 4 hour figure is what you get when you divide the capacity by the power output. You could build it to have half the power output and then the duration would be 8 hours! That would be slightly cheaper to build, but they wanted the 4 hour time because that is the duration that is needed to cover peak demand time in the evening. It's on purpose. If you didn't need the full power output at any given time you could easily output more slowly at say 10% of maximum and make it last 40 hours.
Molten salt is not better because it lasts longer as implied by the video. It's only better if it can be made cheaper. The main problem with lithium is capacity. It would be very expensive and environmentally problematic to increase lithium supply to be large enough to fulfill grid storage needs. We need to save it for the cars where its light weight is important.
Just a suggestion, the music in the background is quite disturbing and few times can’t hear what’s being said, suggest to keep the music little low. But as always great content DW
Agreed...
Was just about to comment the same. Too often the background music was louder than the narrator.
Was going to post the same. This occurs time and again. Not just the overuse of background music, which distracts from the content but poor sound balance which makes matters even worse. Sometimes it's so bad I just give up.
Yes, and most of the pictures shown had nothing to do with the content.
However, DW Planet A provides real and factual content which is rare among mainstream media.
Thanks DW!
Background music in news reports or corporate videos is so 1990’s, it hurts.
"If you can't bring them on a plane" - but you can. People bring lithium ion batteries on planes thousands of times daily. Laptops, phones, smart watches. You're just limited in the size of the lithium battery you can take on a plane. And of course there are different types of lithium batteries. There's also lithium polymer and lithium iron phosphate.
99W limit.
Yes lithium iron phosphates is being used in a lot of EVs coz they are cheap and don't explode and also last longer. Their only disadvantage is a little less energy density that lithium ion.
@@toma.cnc1 100WHr*
@@UhOhUmm its 99,99 WHr actually 100 is illegal you can find it in laptops the maximum is 99,99 not 100 WHr
I think you can bring lithium ion devices on carryon luggage but not check in. I tried to put my computer bag in a check in, and was told to remove it due to the lithium battery on the laptop.
1:38 , short bursts of discharge. That's why you're in my heart guys. Love your videos.
Actually paused to look for this comment
@@collinsngetich3588 lol same
@@collinsngetich3588 yep. I was legit like, hol' up...
@@collinsngetich3588 I'm not alone
i see what you did there DW 😜
At least the world is starting to invest money into the research and development of all kinds of tech to enable a greener future.
Its just marketing
@@wildlifesuport What do you mean by marekting
By the historical indicators we should be entering an extreme innovation period not seen since 120 years. If you think about it, not a lot has fundamentally changed since then technologically in daily life, besides from maybe computers. Energy works the same, cars work the same, washing machines work the same, we use the same fossil fuels etc.. Sure everything has gotten cheaper and better and safer, but the fundamental technologies we interact with every day haven't changed all that much.
But the next decades will fundamentally change a lot of these commodities. Electric/solar cars vs combustion, produce your own "free" energy instead of relying on the grid, work is changed completely, "flying cars" will soon be real and ubiquitous, 3D printing allows you to easily do some manufacturing at home etc..
So many things will change about daily life, it's crazy, and I feel like I forgot about the best ones.
The technological revolution is inevitable now.
@@wildlifesuport "It is just marketing" said by fossil fuel marketing.
💀
For grid storage, you can use the worst battery chemistry, like Iron or Sodium batteries. Energy density can be awful, but it doesn't matter. Unlike in cars or phones, battery size and weight is not a constraint here. The only constraint for grid storage is cost per capacity.
Exactly. Flow batteries are ideal (but not 'sexy').
Why wouldn’t lead acid be better for this? Resistant to temperature?
@@brandontierney9489 Because they dont last long.
size kind of is a constraint, you don't want to take space where we could build houses to put a battery in there
in terms of cost per capacity, sand batteries would be the best, right? i mean, it's dirt, so it's literally dirt cheap.
In fact we have another battery type as an option: high temperature sodium-sulfur (NAS) batteries! It was commercialized 20 years ago by NGK Insulators as stationary battery system and has been used in several countries in the world. Sodium and sulfur is abundant in the world and in my opinion it is one of the best options for now and the future! No one talks about NAS unfortunately, but this system deserves to be globally known.
There must be drawbacks if they are not popular...
@@user-qv6ud2hx6f Not more than LIBs actually. I think that this can be because of the company culture, they don't advertise their product so much.
@@elifceylancengiz7350 Sounds naive. Good stuff doesn't need advertisment - look at Tesla.
@@user-qv6ud2hx6f Do you really think that Tesla didn't do anything for showing the potential of their products? :) Advertisement is not only made by showing the ad on tv or websites.
@@elifceylancengiz7350 Created good product ?
Cobalt: while still used for higher performance batteries, it is being actively weaned out. The new EV battery technologies (LFP; LMFP) are totally doing without it. There is NO need for Co at all for grid storage. Another point about cobalt, which few people know, is that one of cobalt's main usage is as a catalyst for refining oil... or for making the plastic PET bottle you drink your favorite soda/water from! If it is questionable for batteries, then why is it not for other usages... some of them necessary to fuel ICE cars? Could there be some lobbies at work, influencing the media's message?
at 2:45, they mention a need for 10 TWh or storage capacity by 2040. I am afraid that the real number is rather between 200 and 300 TWh! 100 TWh for electrifying the world's entire vehicle fleet, and 200 TWh for transitioning the world's web to renewable energies. The transition will obviously not be fully complete by 2040, which leads me to set the number at less than 300 TWh.
Cobalt is also used in tools, drilling and cutting tools mostly.
@@toma.cnc1 as well as in special steel alloys.
Yes, the EV haters always quote cobalt mining, and then go on to say I am sticking with my ICE car, which of course would not have any fuel if cobalt was removed from the refineries.
"Batteries have a habit of blowing up!" What about petrol engine fires? Perhaps they forgot to mention that as well!! lol
34% of Cobalt was used in EVs in 2021 and 31% in other batteries.11% was industrial chemicals. So no, it's main usage was not refining oil or plastic.I had to look this up because it seemed scandalous on the surface. Turns out, the battery ire is deserved. When it eventually gets actively weaned out it can start decreasing in total share of total cobalt usage and then the pressure can lay off, not before.
Been thinking for a while salt could be an interesting option for energy storage and be a commercial use for brine waste from desalination plants killing two birds with one stone.
killing birds with stones is pretty barbaric. Why not harness those birds for some naturally produced energy and use the stones for a Zen garden?
Batteries would not require enormous amount of salt but desalination plants will produce
@@kailashseervi3448 Yes I can't say that I've looked into the quantites involved in both processes or even if the brine would be too contaminated to use. Even if it lessened the impact of desalination it could still be worth it? Really more of a thought bubble idea.
@@kailashseervi3448 but it would still decrease the cost of both technologies, and if you can scale up sodium batteries, they can replace lithium for all applications that arent weight limited, and if molten salt reactors are to become commonplace, thats another usage of sodium right there. honestly, we do need to figure out what to do with all the sodium weve been extracting because putting them into the ocean is becoming a worse and worse option as shorelines get wrecked. maybe if we trekked it out to the deep ocean it wouldnt be as big of an issue.
@@kailashseervi3448 it wouldn't be the only one method to exploit brine. Another one that I'm thinking of is the chloroalkali process for example.
As someone who sels PV power plants, I'm baffled at the current focus on Litium batteries for house storage. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't care if their battery was 5x bigger if they could get them at a fraction of the cost. This goes double for grid storage. We should focus on low-cost scalable solutions. You know like PV itself...
I feel like the risk of lithium ion batteries burning is (as so often) greatly exaggerated. We often forget that petrol can just immediately blow up if incinerated but nobody thinks about it as they trust the technology they know. Likewise there is no higher risk for electric vehicles to just start burning as compared to normal cars.
There is higher risk than fossil fuel ones because fuels have to have contact with the fire but lithium batteries can combust for a quite few reasons. But taking that as a factor for replacing lithium is as you said an exaggeration
@@nadheem420 fossil fuel cars burn 10times more often than electric cars…
even if the risks are exaggerated you still dont want the risk of them blowing up the same thing happens with nuclear energy it is the safest energy by far even if you count all of the reactor deaths but the fact that they can blow up scares the public.
No form of petrol contains its own oxidizer like a lithium battery does.
@@nadheem420 yes and no. You could argue that lithium batteries can start burning when they get for example punctured, whilst a fuel tank does not. However, if you hold a match against petrol it will start burning immediately whilst the same isn't true for lithium batteries. But you can't conclude that one is better or worse than the other when both compare differently on varying aspects.
Note to editor:
If I'm struggling to hear the narrator over clicks and music then you might need to work on your balancing.
Pumped hydro can also work on the seafloor. You put large containers there and energy is generated by letting the seawater flow in, while energy is stored by pumping the seawater out. The large pressure at the bottom of the oceans then allows for a larger energy density compared to conventional pumped hydro systems. E.g. the average depth of the Atlantic Ocean is 3.6 km, so the available pressure difference is 360 bar. And there is, of course, an enormous amount of area available for such systems, unlike conventional pumped hydro systems.
cool concept. but you have to drive some really long cables far far away into the ocean
@@danvisan7017 Yes, that's drawback. But as we move toward net zero, the bottlenecks will be more and more at the storage front and less at the average energy generation capacity. Europe can easily experience 6 weeks of cold winter weather with a high-pressure system causing the wind to not blow fast. Energy use will then be high while not much green energy van be generated. So, the storage capacity required would be of the order of the total consumption during more than a month. Energy consumption in Europe is s about 2800 Terawatt hours in year, so we need about 230 Terawatt hours storage capacity.
So, huge investments in many different large-scale storage systems are going to be required, otherwise there is no hope to reach net-zero.
@@saibalmitra776 this underwater system in particular is prone to failure due to the same reasons as tide, wave and underwater currents energy is not harvested... salt water and underwater algae, shells and other lifestock damages all the equipments
I've loved the concept of saltwater batteries, for years. The US manufacturer of them dropped the ball and went out of business, but not because the product was bad. Thanks for finally mentioning them. Is there any news of a new manufacturer for them stepping forward? I heard a rumor of a Chinese company doing so. They would not be good for cars, but with their low manufacturing cost, and their durability, they could be quite useful for home, business, and grid storage. A Li-ion home storage solution maybe the size of a breaker box, and a saltwater would be the size of a dishwasher, but if it's only a few hundred dollars, rather than $5k+, it's an attractive option for most places.
That’s not why saltwater batteries were abandoned. Their real problem is that salt batteries also consume metal (magnesium , etc) and very low in power density. It’s literally done in high school chemistry lab! Not feasible in commercial setting.
My daughter's Gameboy battery still works perfectly since 2006. I can't believe it. We keep charging it to see how long it will last.
Thank you for the video, it was very nice but the background music at times was so lound that I couldn't hear what was being said anymore. Many thanks from Holland.
I like the honesty of the noble prize winner " you work with nice people, they do the hard work and you comeback take as much credit as you can hahaha" this summerise the corporative nature of today universities and companies.
1:37 is that what i think it is?
I know
Ok. I wasn’t the only one to notice that and think WTH?
That's by far the best DW production that I've watched. Thanks
Bot or what?
I think Sodium ion will win it.
We don't have enough lithium to use for grid energy storage as we would need them for cars, buses, etc
While sodium can't be used for cars because of its low energy density, so Sodium is perfect for stationary use.
It is also very abundant and cheaply available.
It can be if cars were lighter and more efficient as such that the lower density would be at least compensated.
Nobody needs to drive a >1 ton vehicle that can kill at high enough velocities.
@@topsecret1837 no. If the car body was lighter that would mean that the battery would be a larger portion of the weight so it would be even more important to make the battery as light as possible.
@@topsecret1837 batteries would be more useful in a bus and electric train backup power than for cars tbh. cars needs to be phased out, electric or not, within major population centres if one really wants to make a positive impact on the environment.
Salt? The byproduct of desalination. Wonderful. Helps solve two problems.
One of the most promising energy storage solution is to convert coal and gas fired power plants, which already have turbines and high pressure steam infrastructure, and convert them to instead heat the water to steam with a molten salt energy storage system. The power plant operator can extend the profits of the plant that would otherwise have to be decommissioned.
Yiu can also create gravity batteries by pumping water in a reservoir located higher. Very useful !
Coal and gas power stations are the future as they are efficient and reliable and dont need sun or wind.
@@fivish The future? U live in 1800s or what bro goddamn 😂
@@padnomnidprenon9672 Yeah, the video covered that at 3:17
@@fivishuh are you living in the first industrial revolution.
These are all great methods to store energy, and I agree we will need them all plus several more not mentioned in this video, like Ambri’s battery tech and liquid air from companies like Highview
LFP batteries solves the problems of regular lithium batteries. They don't contain cobolt, very safe, are cheaper, have a very long life, can be charged full regulary without taking much damage at all. Their main disadvantage is that they are not as energy dense as normal lithium batteries, but they can be charged to 100% to compensate for that limitation.
LFP will most likely dominate for 10 years at least, since new technology will take time arrive to the market. Sodium might take over the in 15 years, who knows?
Unfortunately, specific energy density is low. It is an alternative technique but not better
@@emirhanartar1776 it's good enough, LFP is the best batteries for the buck, cheap and reliable.
@@SkepticalCaveman youll probably see it in low power devices that typically dont even currently use lithium ion tbh. sodium is probably going to be confined to grid level storage, not personal devices. the issues are inherent to its physics, there is no optimising the fact that sodium has a mass number of 11 while lithium has a mass number of 3. thats ~4x heavier per atom, not including the greater molecular size and electron density that prevents packing like Li.
@@jonathanodude6660 Sodium for grid storage actually frees up more litium for vehicles, so still very useful.
Litium is already good enough for cars, they don't need more than 800 km range, that is aleady gasoline car range. Instead of increasing range, more energy density should lead to less batteries needed and therefor cheaper and liighter EV's.
For planes, swappable magnesium air batteries might be the best solution, thanks to the very high energy density. Just split the battery into many small (100 or so maybe?) modules do they are not too heavy to swap. The advantages with many smaller modules is that they can be used for other things after they been in a plane, like powering the vehicles at the airport as an example. Magnesium air batteries age fast, but that doesn't matter for planes since they use up so much energy every day that the batteries will be emptied anyway long before that.
For ships actually hydrogen might be the best option. I'm no fan of hydrogen, but for cargo ships a liquid fuel is ideal for fast refilling. Hydrogen can also be generated at sea by electrolysis using, wind, solar and waves; so one of the disadvantages of hydrogen (need of transportation) is eliminated, since the ship travel to the refilling stations on their route.
Background music is way too loud and makes listening to the voices difficult. Apart from that, very good info.
Absolutely agree. The script is great but the narrator mumbles out the words and the music is too loud to hear them.
I had come to expect better sound work from this channel. The volume of the narrator is so much lower than the music, effects, and recordings that it hard to parse what she's saying
I like the gravity storage I read about years ago. Instead of water and pumps it works off heavy weights being lifted that in turn generate power when lowered
I don't know for sure but assume that losses due to friction might be significant, so efficiency loss. Otherwise, I like the idea for its simplicity.
Have you bothered to check just how LITTLE energy you can store like this ? Thunderf00t has a good 'busted' video on the subject.
Thanks for suggesting this video to me @DW Planet A . Great video.👍
The device disayed at 1:38 seems like it might have nefarious utility😆
Good lord I was scrolling through the comments to see if someone pointed this out😭😭😂😂😂
Finally, somebody have mentioned it lol
There wasn't much detail in this video. How do you convert the heat to electricity? Steam turbine? And how did that one guy transport heat to other buildings for heating? Steam pipes?
That is operating in a town that already used district heating, ie central heat source transferred to buildings through pipes. They just connected the sand battery to the existing system.
And also consider the energy loss. Mechanical energy > thermal energy > mechanical energy > electricity
There are many inconsistencies. Obviously, businesses would want to promote their technology as best even when this is not true.
Interesting and informative. Love your sense of humour.
Please more from this reporter! So calm voice and so good content, no bias as should be
Your audio is catching air causing pops. Might wanna turn your mic to the side instead of speaking directly into it if you're using a condenser mic. Pointing it at your mouth from the side or up/down will still pick up the audio the same way while not getting hit by your breath.
The end of this video was the best part; people have stored energy in rocks since learning how to make a fire. Cooling works differently, but even frogs know how to shelter from heat.
Storing energy as heat is the dumbest thing ever. Something this clueless apology for a documentary failed to mention. You'll get only 30% of the energy back as electricity.
Very interesting and very important, in fact it's so important countless wars have been fought over energy supply.
Sodium, vanadium and radium, noted I have actually thought of batteries being as small as a phone or even an AA battery and powering a car for days.
hi from Mexico! Great video + topic!! Lithium can be unstable and dangerous if not charged correctly, so the salt and sand batts, can be a solution to this! Also those diamond/nuclear batteries present another option! We make vids on many subjects also, from Mexico. About the quality of this video: the voice was hard to hear/discern words from at times. Perhaps the musical sountrack could have been turned down a bit .. 😃, otherwise great vid! 😊
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very common now, I use them in my home solar system and increasingly EVs have them. Pictures of kids cobalt mining seem to be in every video about renewable energy and EVs reinforcing the view among many that fossil fuels are better!
And don't forget that new Li battery design have reduced/eliminated cobalt.
most of the cobalt is being used to stabilize unleaded gasoline
Didn't know Li-Ion batteries were developed by a guy who's last name is Goodenough. That explains A LOT!
Very good information. Danke 🙏🏽
You don't need huge lakes for pumping water. We can have two tanks one on the top and another at the ground level or under-ground. We can have a pump and pipes running between the two tanks. In fact this setup can be scaled by having as many of them as required. There are problems though.
One of the problems is that the water might get contaminated and can breed mosquitoes and algae might grow causing damage to the tanks. The solution is to constantly purify the water and replace it if it cannot be purified anymore. Another problem is that the water might evaporate over time and the way to deal with this problem is to replenish it (automatically) if the water goes down below a certain level. A third problem is that we need a source of water and this can be solved by installed this setup in the sea or ocean where there is abundance of water.
There could be other alternatives to water such as soil, sand, snow, ice (in cold regions) etc...
Rather than sand, could they use recycled glass grind down to sand size?
I would use lead acid deep cycle batteries for domestic and industrial use, and leave the lithium ion for portable applications such as electric cars, smartphones, etc.
lead is a bit of a 'no no' these days,
Some good points made, lithium certainly has it's problems and limited to electricity whereas these alternatives are mostly heat storage not electrical. Molten salt is very good at storing heat but is also very corrosive.
100% correct.
Maintenance costs are the very reason it hasn't taken off in the last several decades.
Excellent video. Thank you.
There are many battery technologies that might replace lithium. However, the best thing that we could use in the medium term to replace lithium, I'd lithium itself. Recycling used batteries requires much less energy and pollutes much less than mining and refining "fresh" lithium. It's a metal, it is not destroyed through usage.
The short lifespan and premature recycling reduces the Energy-Storage-Return-On-Energy-Invested to a point where they are no longer viable for grid scale storage. Lithium ion is simply insane to be using for grid storage. At least lithium iron phosphate can ba amortized across 10,000 charge cycles.
The technology can be developed through necessity by law by making manufacturers be responsible for also extracting the lithium on the end of the lifespan.
That means they will have to figure out how to make it cheaper to recycle
Once you convert electric energy into heat stored in sand or molten salt you can recover not much more than half of the electrical energy when converting the stored heat back to electrical energy. This conclusion is based on Carnot's theorem. Your method for storing the energy may be literally dirt cheap, but losing half of the energy still is a deal breaker.
For storing heat these storage media might be suitable, but not for storing electrical energy.
1:38 Interesting choice of an example of "consumer electronics".
Seems like the video editor is a musician who gave his complete effort to get succeed on only listening the music but not the content for which the actually video is made good one buddy keep going
There's this great tool called a pop filter and I think your sound team could really use one.
being honest i can see(hear?) her doing asmr with such quality
@@lesbianpancake489 I respect your opinion and am inclined to agree. Also if the OP sees this, sorry for being passive aggressive.
2:10
Only the high-end, high energy li-ion batteries require cobalt and even those are reducing its usage continuously. The majority of the volume of shipped li-ion batteries (LFP) does not contain cobalt at all. Not a real issue.
Oh I thought Lithium Phosphate was just entering the market.
@@anxiousearth680 yes and no. LFPs are not used in consumer electronics and power tools because of lower energy density, but for cars they're already quite widespread. My wife's Model 3 from 2020 has a LFP battery.
I would like to see salt quartz hybrid battery hypothesis, considering how salt quartz can withstand temperatures 🌡 around 1500° and still remain sold
Excellent ep. thx DW👍
what's next? potato battery?
Different batteries have different advantages and disadvantages. It is essential to find the right type of battery for each application.
I did my internship in TEHRI dam and they are yet to finish their PSP pump storage plant. 1000 MW plant.
Basically two dams are built one small other one large. Tehri dam reservoir takes water from smaller dam when electricity is cheap and than use that storage water to run 4 turbines.
Hey, do you have any idea what happened to broadbit sodium batteries?
Unusually, this is a really poor video from DW PlanetA full of basic errors and mis-explanations.
Firstly there is no mention of storage time which is critical for understanding the problem. Storage over milliseconds to seconds to hours will probably be solved by whatever is the cheapest electrical battery technology: probably lithium because nothing else has the scale.
For longer storage there are many competitors as the video mentions. But the sand battery can NOT store sand at 500 °C for "months". A simple calculation shows the 100 tonnes of sand will lose 50% of its energy in 2 months. And that battery stores only 8 MWh(th) - enough for 2 homes for 1 winter. And it cannot be used for industry which requires lots more heat at higher temperatures.
Secondly Lithium batteries environmental impact is grossly overstated. And no mention is made that the most modern battery chemistry (LiFeP)which uses no cobalt or nickel i.e. no child labour. Or that the main use for cobalt is actual in petrol refining, not making batteries.
Thirdly, lithium batteries last an enormously long time - hundreds of thousands of kilometres in a car - or thousands of discharge cycles in a grid application. And they are almost 100% re-cyclable. And while older battery chemistries can catch fire, modern LiFeP batteries do not catch fire. And molten salt? Well it throws away 70% of its stored energy when it is used to make electricity.
I can't list all the errors - but unlike most @DW Planet A videos - this one is very poor.
Hopefully you will do better next week.
They did talk about duration 5:30 - 5:50, but it was garbage. They said the molten salt storage can store energy for 6 hrs but lithium only for 4 hrs. But lithium can store energy for months with little loss if you wanted it to. 4 hours is the time frame that they make the most profit out of it typically. It's purely economics that sets that time frame. Shocking levels of inaccuracy.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 Adrian, yes. I agree with what you said exactly. I was writing my comment in haste and didn't have the patience to express myself as clearly as you. Thank you.😁
Favorite channel!
great content as always :D would have earned more viral attention
@ 1:37 is that what I think it is?
Sand heat is very interesting and easy to do that's amazing 🤩
It is a great idea, but it requires a district heating network, so that you can heat water and distribute it to consumers.
Organic/biobatteries need to be developed faster. Technology needs to start being made to require as little(or ideally zero) rare earth materials as possible.
Found skynet
A sand battery? What’s next, a battery made of farts.
@1:36 Love that DW used a big pink vibrator as an example of "consumer electronics."🤣
Idk if you guys take suggestions but could you talk about thorium power at some point?
Thorium is abundant but lacks fissile matter, the crux of nuclear fission chain. We will have to borrow fissile from uranium or plutonium from used fuel. The nuclear big brothers frown on the processes of enrichment for U235 or reprocessing from used fuel for plutonium.
Yeah I'm aware of the fact that it needs other materials to actually produce, could it just use new plutonium or would that not be economically viable? I'm not entirely knowledgeable on how breeder reactors work but I try ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why cant we just make homes more sustainable like heating or cooling are home 5 to 8 times a day is better then 20 or more times a day.
Why not use thirsty cement to reduce flooding and increase groundwater levels.
Have tall buildings have solar on the walls.
Parking lots solar trees or thirsty cement or all of it in a parking lot to reduce are demands.
"why not just build things that are more expensive?"
Because if we utilise cheaper solutions (read: renewable energy and large-scale storage), we can implement them more widely.
Do all of it.
combination of these energy storages might be the solution. Important variables will be terrain, cost, economics, public policy, EIA etc
01:23 Rachid Yazami is a Moroccan scientist, engineer, and inventor of the graphite anode (negative pole) for lithium-ion batteries.
I disagree with the very first statement you made, 'We all know the future of energy is in renewables' - and this video is discussing the the ways we may be able to overcome the intermittency of renewables.
Nuclear doesn't have that problem. It works 24/7, 365 days a year, pretty much for 60+ years.
The new designs have prices per kWh from 3c - 10c per kWh, and don't need much storage.
Nuclear can also deliver heat directly to industry at prices 2c-5c per kWh, pretty cheap and reliable.
The future is nuclear..
yeah, europe could use the waste heat from nuclear power plants to charge up sand heat batteries year round, then use that stored heat in the winter. Waste heat from nuclear is quite high. Co-generation if sent to the sand battery.
@@bocadelcieloplaya3852 It would make sense in winter to use the local housing/ office stock as the coolant rather than just wasting it. That could also be said of the normal conventional power stations.
I think any element on that left column region of periodic table can replace lithium is just that more R&D need to be done and in the end it also depends on "commercially available"
1:38 nice.
The future of energy is not JUST renewables. New nuclear has incredible efficiency and at least one of the designs also uses molten salt. Not only can it store energy (ie from the grid) but it can also be used as part of the reactor fuel and cooling (it's called an MSR). This means you can also generate heat as needed, as well as store excess grid energy as heat in the molten salt. A 1 ton cube of uranium or thorium is about 14 in (35 cm) on a side and provides 40 million kWh. It takes an area ~300m (1000 ft) on a side to do that in solar per year and you still need storage. You need 100,000+ tons of coal to get the same from fossil, so that puts everything in comparison.
But it has the word "nuclear" in it so it must be scary right?
molten salt and corrosion, read up on it
@@markgonzales3588 HasteloyN is rather corrosion resistant and a lot of research is going into this.
@@alainpannetier2543 It isn't ever going to be personal sized, most SMRs are in the 100 MW range, about 10x smaller than commercial reactors. Also, there are orders now for these around the world, including in Ontario Canada. Finally, I think you are confusing SMR with MSR. SMR is small modular reactor, and MSR is molten salt reactor.
@@alainpannetier2543 We will see. It will take a few years but we will see. You'd better hope it isn't though, because it is about the only source of energy dense enough to undo the CO2 damage. It will take many thousands of TWh to undo, and that's after we stop using fossil.
Aluminium air batteries are supposedly becoming standard in India. They are energy dense and easy to recycle.
Ooh nice!
@@IJoeAceJRI The aluminum hydroxide left after discharge is the exact feedstock used in creating raw aluminum.
Today the spot price is $2.40 per kilo, and the 'used' battery has recycle value.
So, while this is a modular swap approach as opposed to charge in place, there is never the issue of battery degradation.
@@IJoeAceJRI There are aluminum recyclers and mills all over.
The aluminum battery is said to offer about 1,000 miles (1.600 kilometers)
How do you get a tank of propane for a grill?
The logistics are about the same and I'd imagine the volume of transactions wouldn't be an order of magnitude greater.
When we buy a new lead acid battery for an ICE car we bring the old one back and it gets recycled.
Aluminum is a LOT less toxic than lead and sulphuric acid.
@@IJoeAceJRI That is correct.
4:22
if I remember correctly, pure Sodium will blow up. You need to store it in the oil to prevent chemical reaction.
sodium can be VERY unstable
The drawback is salt, like Lithium, like Oil still has to be withdrawn from the earth, whether from a well or a mine shaft, it is NOT a renewable source. The difference is that salt mines already exist and are plentiful, whereas Lithium mines are not and destroy the land in the area where Lithium is mined.
Feeling a bit less worried after watching this, thanks!
I'm confused as to what the thing at 1:38 is? Never seen one of those before in my life
1:30
That laugh still haunts me
Chile, Bolivia and Argentina: 🎵We're going down in a spiral to the ground, no one is gonna save us nooow!🎶
A back of the envelope calculation how much sand would be required for 10.000 GWh thermal energy storage:
The project in Finland stores 8 MWh in a silo 4 meters wide, 7 meters tall. This is 88 cubic meters. So we can roughly say 1 MWh of heat storage requires 10 cubic meters.
1 GWh would require 10.000 cubic meters.
10.000 GWh would require 100 million cubic meters which is 'only' 1/10 th of a cubic kilometer of sand.
This is thermal storage and you also want electrical storage of course, but it sounds doable.
Reminder that LiFePO4 does not use cobalt or catch fire and has been ignored for way too long.
Yep! And it's non-toxic! LiFePo4 is the best.
The only reason lithium extraction requires so much water right now is because the way they do it in those countries in South America is with evaporation ponds. Direct lithium extraction, using selective membranes, will be able to recover 3x more lithium while using 90% less water.
is it more expensive?
Whomever voiced this piece did a brilliant job.
The storage needs included in the cost of energy sources beyond % of supply or your whistling in the sunny wind.
Good enough is still working on new battery tech still he seems like a great guy
The first thing that came to my mind when they said "sodium has low energy density" was to use an element that has two spare electrons, and i thought that I was a genius until they said the exact same thing a second later
I'm glad you didn't mention that bogus gravity tower project.
Great Video thank you
If where running out of sand then can we use crushed glass for the heat storage
There's already a lot of sand in deserts which could be removed and also help to terraform the area.
Can quantum dots or structures like knots be used in such sand batteries. Maybe radio waves are used to heat sea sand soaked with a percentage of water to produce flames for more heat. Maybe place those near radio towers and condense some of the waves on the sands?
I love the way swaminathan thinks it's the same way all the countries should be thinking that is having multiple solutions being used simultaneously. Humans in the past decades have over relied on oil, gas and coal so in the future human can diversify energy generation and storage as one solution doesn't fit all
Thanks for the video.
Great video👍🏻
When you say of molten salt storage tha 'the hope is that the market will eventually make it achievable' what you're saying is that 'the hope is that alternatives will become so expensive that it's no longer too hard'. What a thing to wish for!
@5:21 all the meant is peltier effect modules that u run backwards ive already looked into that enough and stuff
Such a new and thrilling Technology and soulless presentation..
I'm pretty certain that Nuclear energy will be an huge game changer for battery, for example the two main companies: NDB and Arkenlight, to simply say, it uses nuclear waste and lab-made diamonds in nano scale to make power out of gamma rays.
And this battery will be functional up to twenty-eight thousand of years, what's funny is that it outlives the device, but right now it's the opposite.
Sodium is infinitely more abundant than Lithium (salt deposits & seawater), but 3 times heavier, which is fine for stationary battery storage. It is the future for electric energy storage
1:38 did nobody notice that? 😂