Climate Basics Podcast Ep 4: Batteries

Batteries plus Solar & Wind are The Cheat Code - Ep4 #battery #windsolarbattery #gridbattery

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Hi, everyone.This is Climate Basics, a podcast where we bring a realistic and optimistic perspective on green technology.And I'm Greg Chang.And I'm Ty Haugh. And Ty, we have a big show today.I'm very excited.Lots to cover.We're going to talk about batteries.And I got to tell you, back in my day, decades ago, I was never quite excited about batteries.But now learning about renewable energy, so wind and solar and geothermal and all the rest, and the effect that it has on the grid, I guess batteries are just very, very important, aren't they?They are the unanswered question that remains in figuring out how to do truly green grid scale energy.Right.And so I guess, you know, with our infrastructure system, the one that we've been using for one hundred and twenty five or 150 years, it started with.coal power generating plants.And so the hub and spoke model, the coal plant would be somewhere close to the city, but then the coal would produce the electricity and then the transmission wires would send them into the city and travel ten miles, 20 miles, 30 miles.And then coal changed to oil producing plants and then it changed to natural gas producing plants.But now that the world is understanding that solar has dropped its price by over 90 percent in the past decade and that wind turbines are getting cheaper and batteries are here.Maybe you can explain for our listeners why batteries are important in a solar and wind dominated transmission grid.Right.So the system you talked about, the historical energy grid, it's based on the idea of just having production, transmission, and use.There isn't a fourth step of storage because whatever is being used in that hour is being producedfrom that, as you said, that hub and distributed to all the spokes.And a lot of managing an energy grid for the past centuries was simply making sure that you were producing about the same amount of energy that you were collectively using.And if you were producing less energy than that, that's a brownout.And if you produced more energy than that,That's explosions.That's bad.But there wasn't this extra step of having to store the energy and then collect it again.Now, why we need to start talking about that when switching from fossil fuels to renewables is very simple.The fossil fuel plant goes on our schedule.Renewables, they go on the schedule of nature.The diurnal cycle, the patterns of the winds, the tides and waves, if you're in a coast doing really next-gen energy, these are forces that are great for sustained energy production, but we're not in control of exactly how much is produced hour to hour, day to day.So to make up for that irregularity,to normalize it, that's why we need batteries.Yeah, I like that.I like how you've explained it.So the thing with fossil fuels is that they reside on the earth's crust or a few hundred meters below or what have you.So traditionally we've dug up coal, we've dug up oil, we've dug up natural gas, we've shipped it over to the power generation plant.And then, like you said, I guess that's where firm base load occurs.You can just run the plant, you can turn on the plant, turn down the plant as you need.And you provide energy as you require.But of course, as you said, you know, we have this wonder of nature providing us with all the energy we could possibly ever use, but we have to abide by their schedule.And so batteries fill that need.Yeah.There's one more part we should talk about is that our consumption is also very changing.When it's really hot out, we run the AC.When we're all home in the evening on Netflix, we use more electricity.When we're gone at work in the middle of the day, we use a little bit less.Middle of the night when everyone's asleep, use a lot less.Unless it's cold, then we're maybe running electric heaters, right?So there's these ups and downs that are predictable, but highly variable in energy use.So it's not just a matter of stabilizing the energy going in, but also making it match the energy that's actually being used right then.And that's where storage really is actually critical.for making sure that the solar energy accumulated over the week is distributed to each house in the hour that it needs it.Right.And so they, I guess people in the industry call that load shifting.Yeah.Yeah.So, so that's great.So batteries, boy, that's an, this is an exciting area.Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into it because there is money to be made, isn't there?And it's going to continue growing over the next 20, 30 years.This is a hugely, hugely profitable industry to get into on the ground level.Right.And everybody needs it.Everybody needs batteries on a small scale and everybody needs batteries on a larger scale.So steel making plants for a large commercial user and of course, the transmission grid.And so I think what we're going to do then Ty, in order to try to break this down, because it's not like solar panels, there's sort of one type of solar panel and you can dive deep into it.We've got lots of types of batteries, but the 3, the 3 categories that I think we're going to talk about then areNumber one, chemical batteries.Number 2, thermal batteries.And number 3, kinetic batteries.And so what we'll do is we'll take them in sequence.So number one, chemical batteries.Maybe you can explain to our listeners what chemical batteries are and then give some common examples as to where the chemical batteries are, you know, sort of surrounding us in our day to day.Right.So chemical batteries are probably what most people think of when they hear the word battery.And it's a technology that's actually been around since antiquity, but more and more useful over time.It's the thing that's powering your phone, your laptop, your children's toys, your whatever people have instead of a Game Boy now, Nintendo DS, I don't know.Chemical batteries operate basically on there being an unequal electron state between 2 different materials.Not a chemist, not getting into chemistry, but essentially pH has to do with whether the material you're talking about has enough electrons, neutral pH, too many or too few.If it has too many, then it's going to try to exchange electrons with another material nearby that has too few.Or vice versa.So what every chemical battery has in common is that it chooses a couple materials, one that has higher electrons than it wants and one that has lower electrons than it wants, and then interfaces those with each other and in that exchange generates an electric current.right.So it sounds sort of very complicated and it actually is, but with all the electric vehicles around us, they have chemical batteries, the Tesla Powerwall that people might be familiar with.They use chemical batteries, as you already said, the phones and a lot of consumer goods.I mean, it's all chemical batteries becauseThe beauty of the chemistry is that you can make it responsive, so it's a good battery, but you can also make it very small and rather lightweight.And for its use, it can charge and discharge, I guess, thousands of times and still be good a few years later.Yeah, depending on the material and the way the battery is built, it's actually a very long-term solution.Chemical batteries have also been around a lot longer than a lot of the other solutions we're talking about.We've had various forms of industrial chemical batteries for a century, and we keep getting better at making them.I remember in the nineties, we had the first generation of rechargeable home batteries, double A's and triple A's.And yeah, just considering charging time capacity, we have exponentially increased our knowledge of chemical battery production since then.Right.Yeah.Those, those rechargeable batteries.Oh, I've gone through dozens and dozens of them there.They really weren't that great.And when I compare it to my phone and the heavy usage that is, you know, that is the phone of today, it's just remarkable in 25, 30 short years, it's come that far so quickly.Now, that said, chemical batteries do have their limits.When they get unstable, they get a little explodey, burny, smoky in very unpleasant ways.They produce terrible fumes when that happens and are health hazards.And a lot of the chemicals that are used for them are hard to come by or hard to stabilize or hard to process, sometimes all 3.And so recycling and storage of the materials is a big question that hasn't been completely answered either.Right.And so chemical batteries, it's a big area.So I guess reuse, trying to repurpose batteries that are maybe not fit for function, but can go into secondary use, maybe on the grid with less response, but maybe long duration.Recycling, as you said, from estimates I've read, you know, certain minerals can be recycled over and over so thatBy the time we get to 20 50, we actually, despite growing demand for batteries, we might be able to service quite a bit of it with just recycling.Yeah.Yeah.And already there's a there's a grid scale energy storage company that takes old car batteries, puts them in a giant array in a storage container and uses that to actually load and unload energy from renewables.I mean, there's a lot of approaches and some of them are already on the market.And Ty, isn't that just a tad better?You do the mining, you build the battery, and then it's fit for purpose.But when it starts to fall off, then you repurpose it in an array of batteries, etc.You compare that to digging for oil.How many barrels of oil would you have to dig up and transport?And that oil is burnt one time.It's incomparable.It's incomparable.Anything that actually can be used repeatedly is a separate category than that which can only be used once.Fundamentally, when we talk about sustainability, we have to ask with everything, is this something that can be part of a circular economy or isn't it?Now, to finish up here on chemical batteries, there is really one important point, and it's for people who maybe are a little hesitant or maybe they are particularly influenced by, you know, the argument of, well, geez, one country, China, is controlling the mining.They've got the supply chain, they've got the refineries, they've got rare earths or what have you.So chemical batteries, I guess, are part of this mix of the supply chain, the refinery.They fall within that category.Is that right?Not all of them.A lot of traditional chemical batteries, like the lithium ion you'll find in your phone and your laptop, those involve rare earth metals.But there are a lot of ways to make very functional chemical storage that doesn't rely on rare earth metals.For example, there's a battery that uses iron.and oxidization, literally changes the iron to rust, changes the rust back into iron.And those are the positive and negative charges materials that are used in that battery.So there's a lot of options.Iron, that's not rare at all.That's kind of everywhere.It's everywhere, right?And for sustainability and for scalable development,We want to try to prioritize technology that anyone can do anywhere if they just have the willingness to grow.Right.Okay.Well, that's great, Ty.You know, in terms of this, why don't we move on to the second category of batteries?And so that's thermal batteries.And thermal is, I guess, the description for heat for the difference in temperature.But in terms of thermal batteries, I guess part of the benefit for thermal batteries is that they can offer longer duration storage.I guess chemical batteries mostly are shorter, say 4 hours or less, and then long duration, you can get into much longer durations in order to store energy.Yeah, there's advantages and disadvantages to all of these.For me, the big thing about thermal energy when compared with chemical energy is that you don't have the chance of a fire or an explosion.You just have really unreasonably hot bricks.Right.So the worst problem you might have with a thermal battery is a containment issue.where the insulations breaks and you have loss of heat higher than the average.But they're incredibly stable when you have the space to build them.They do take up a little bit of space because you're talking about building large masses of solid or sometimes liquid materials, and then using the heat differential, that is to say, the difference between how hot that material is and how cool some other material nearby is to generate energy.This can be with turbines or various other types of heat exchange.Right.And so thermal batteries, like for example, so people understand, if you are in a house or you're in an apartment and you have a water heater that allows you to have hot water in the morning when you take your shower, I mean, that in a sense is a thermal battery.It's not something you're going to power your life on.But the point is, is thatcold water from the tap then gets heated and it's stored there and that is energy.You end up using that water for a shower, but that's a thermal battery in a sense, is it not?In fact, this is even older technology than the chemical batteries.A lot of the Mediterranean, for example, will put the water tank on the rooflet the sun rays hit it and have free hot water hot enough to shower and wash your dishes with just from where it's stored and how it's stored.There's a lot of ways to collect thermal energy.And in fact, when we're talking about how energy comes to the earth from the sun, thermal is actually one of the main waysthat the earth experiences the energy of the sun.And it's also the basis of why there's wind is because of differences in heat and thus pressure and thus wind in the atmosphere.So in a way, wind turbines are originally based in thermal energy production.Right?Yeah, absolutely.And so, so that people understand sort of how much smart money is going into this.So, so thermal energy can use very common materials, I guess.So you don't get into the rare earth mining, you don't get into the critical supply chain of mining.Like, for example, there are companies which are trying to use bricks and rocks in order to satisfy our need to stabilize the transmission grid off solar and wind.They're actually using bricks and rock.Yeah, you can use ceramics.You can use stone.You can use various cheap metals like tin.You can even use sand.Sand.Okay.Well, we'll get, well, sand is sand.I guess when you mix it with clay and all the rest of it, you come up with brick essentially.Right.Maybe, maybe.So the point is it almost doesn't matter what the material is, as long as it can be put into a situation where it holds heat for aSo there's one company that I've listened to and they're doing well.They're going through their venture capital seed rounds and they've built prototypes.They've put in their batteries into real world testing and that's Rondo Energy.And so you and I have talked about that before.They're actually using brick and they're superheating their bricks to about fifteen hundred C. And what they're hoping to do is they're hoping to be theplug and play for steel companies.And I guess when you make concrete, when you make steel, those companies, the steel and concrete companies have actually been using brick themselves for a hundred years, a hundred and fifty years or whenever the industrial revolution started.Yeah.Keeping the heat of the blast furnaces day to day saves a lot of startup energy.That's right.And so Rondo and I guess its other competitors, they're trying to superheat these bricks, keep it in a safe container, but plug it in so that instead of using boilers, which can use up a lot of electricity, and if you're creating that electricity from natural gas, that's not great, but plug it in and actually try to, as much as possible, decarbonize the concrete and the steelmaking process.Yeah.It's totally possible.If you have green energy production and storage on the grid, and then you make an efficient steel factory where the thermal exchange is conserved for the most part and stored from one step to the next, you can actually, yeah, and green steel does exist.It's just not very common yet.Right, right.And yeah, and I guess really in that industry, just generally the manufacturers, they're very, very sensitive to price.And so there is a cost to switching over as with any infrastructure and until they're forced to do so, I guess they won't.There's another, you mentioned it previously, sand.I mean, there are a bunch of companies here, Batsand, Polar Knight, Newton Energy Services.These companies are trying to use sand, which Ty, I think is amazing because we've got a beach close by and there's just a lot of that stuff.I mean, it's all around.So yeah.What can you tell us about these sand batteries?Well, sand is a very interesting material.You know, it's a crystalline structure that behaves under certain scales and pressures like almost a liquid, although it's made of particles of solid, right?And this allows it to fill some roles that otherwise would have to be filled by molten metal, but also at lower energy states than that same metal.Right.And so I guess, and one of the big things about thermal energy is that they can fulfill the long duration, I guess, category for battery storage.That is with chemical batteries, with renewable energy coming in, so solar comes in, wind comes in.Part of the problem is that sometimes the electricity or the amount of power coming in is rather intense.There's a lot of it and other times it's a little bit more variable.And so maybe the chemical batteries are short duration batteries and they can stabilize the grid by taking energy and then putting it back when you need it.but the long duration, uh, thermal batteries, they can also assist, right?I mean, Germany's got that, that saying, is it what, what's the saying where there's no wind and no sun?anyways, I don't know.Yeah.Yeah.Sorry.Well, we'll figure that out and put it in the show notes.But anyways, when, when there's no wind and there's no sun and it lasts for a while, then you could rely on long duration batteries.Yeah.that's a really important point, actually.It's not simply a matter of pick the cheapest tech for your grid, plant down, and then you're ready to go.You can be green.It's more that there are several different categories of duration, each of which you have to have a solution to.So there's kind of the hour to hour.And for that, chemical batteries or other types of kinetic batteries, even flywheels, are actually very efficient.Then there's over the course of the day or day-to-day.Then there's week and month long.You need to have a type of energy storage for that immediate rise and lower in the moment, something for over the course of a day to even it out, and something for long-term storage.If you have something for each of those ranges of time,then you could really be a truly regenerative grid that can take energy of any sort at any time and end up using it fairly efficiently with only maybe a, you know, 90 to 60 percent drop off.Right.Right.Well, that's great.And so the, the third category of batteries that we were talking about are kinetic.Yeah, you do like it because this is, this is just really interesting.It's really innovative.I mean, it's just putting on your smart boy cap and really just trying to think of ways, how can we use the earth and how can we use what we have already in order to, to do better and to create batteries.So maybe you can,give an overview for the listeners as to what kinetic batteries mean.Okay, so maybe you have a cat.Maybe that cat walks on a piece of furniture and it finds something it wants to knock on the floor.Cats love to knock things over, right?So for me, I view them asbasically agents of entropy, because what they're doing is taking things from a high energy state to a lower energy state.So in physics, there's this term potential energy.Whenever a vase with a very delicate plant that you don't want to get knocked on the floor by a cat is sitting high up on a shelf, because of that potential fall it could have, it has higher potential energythan if it was on the ground, safe from the terror that is your cat.But when the cat knocks it off, that energy is lost in the fall, right?So that's one type of kinetic energy.Another type of kinetic energy is centrifugal force.So we spin a very heavy wheel around, around, around, andthat actually can be then running a small electric turbine, a 2way electric motor can take energy from the grids to spin it faster and slightly slow it to pull energy away from that system.And so just spinning is a type of kinetic energy.Just having a long distance to fall is a type of kinetic energy.Now, the most obvious, the one that everybody has feltWind and water, when they move around, carry a lot of force with them.Those are types of kinetic energy that we already have been harvesting for hundreds and hundreds of years to do different things like cool our houses or regulate our temperatures.Even ants can use some of these types of energy.So just before we lose this thread, and by cat, you mean toddlers, right?I mean, you mean little kids running around?Probably, yeah.Right.But okay, so wind and water.So air and water.And so that's great.So it's interesting because air, you can compress it.And when you compress air, everybody kind of knows when you get air pressure, you have to watch out.So everybodyNot everybody, but lots of people have pressure cookers at home, the crockpots, and everybody has seen even a balloon with some compressed air inside, what happens when you let the air out of the balloon.there's more than that, isn't there, Ty?I mean, you can use large-scale underground caverns in order to compress air.So, for example, a lot of places in the world have a salt mine where we mined out a bunch of salt underground, and now we have a giant cavern that we have no idea what to do with.And in some places, people are taking those, sealing them up, and turning them into batteries made of compressed air or compressed gas.So wait a second, you're not, you're just using what nature has given to you.You're refitting it for purpose.And then you're shoving a whole bunch of air in there, which then makes it very powerful so that when you need to release it, you can create electricity.Yeah, because the pressure makes it go out fast.And when it goes out fast, you can run it through a turbine.The speed produces energy.One big thing about compressed gas is that when you compress and expand things, they also change temperature, right?So when they expand, they lose heat.And when they compress, they gain it.And you need to develop systems.And we have these at these grid scale gas storage facilities where theycollect, remove, store, and give back that heat when it's needed to regulate the physics of the airflow.You can use a thermal battery to store the heat.Exactly.Some of these work with each other extremely well.Right.And so with, with the kinetic, so this, with the air compression and I guess even with water, so I've, you know, they, these smart companies that are throwing money into this, they've used salt caves, they've used former mining sites, they've used depleted gas wells.I think we've talked about that.And also one company used a former railway transportation tunnel and I guess sealed it up and then used that.That's fantastic.We've got spaces underground all over.A lot of which are being ignored.Right, right.So a lot of the time when there'sregeneration work that needs done, conservation, how to deal with all of your depleted mines, there's answers.And those same answers might actually give you the key to making that area green in terms of energy.Right.But they, but you know, 1, one amazing thing about the kinetic batteries is that the lifespan is, is anticipated to be about 50 years.It's just, it's so much longer than what a chemical battery or even a thermal battery, uh, you would expect from it.Right?Yeah, and to talk about the most extreme example of this, also the oldest type of energy we have, hydroelectric isn't just for fast-running rivers and waterfalls.It's also for any time you've got 2 bodies of water at 2 different levels, and you can pump energy, pump water up to the top one, increasing its potential kinetic energy.and then let it flow back down to collect energy from that system.So when you have 2 lakes that are storing energy for you, that is essentially permanent energy storage, which is something that otherwise you could only achieve via, I don't know, fossil fuels, but way cheaper.Yeah, exactly.So in terms of this, we've talked about batteries, we've talked about one chemical, 2 thermal and 3 kinetic batteries.And so, and it's, it's beyond exciting, but in terms of this, maybe you can just remind people who are listening, just how obviously practical batteries are, but how it applies to them, their daily life and also the businesses around them and that sort of thing.Right.So it might seem like grid scale energy isn't a decision you get to make, it kind of is.Energy storage right now is something that a lot of organizations participate in.Most big museums, a lot of factories, whole sectors like all those AI data centers participatethey're generating and storing electricity on site so they don't have interruption of service.Also, every hospital you've ever visited probably was operating with backup plans after backup plans for energy because otherwise you have people dying.So energy storage and energy generation are something that we all participate in, not just one or 2 big factories somewhere far away from town.Now, a more practical example here issay you and your neighbors are all interested in getting solar, then you're starting to reduce your energy costs.You're starting to get a little bit of money from the local energy market.Maybe you make a co-op.Maybe you use the capital that you're getting from those solar panels and use them to buy into a small energy storage grid for your local, we call them micro grids.So if you get to the point where you'reputting energy from your solar panels onto your local grid and then choosing when to sell them to the larger market, you're changing basically from being purely a consumer in this economic space to a transmitter and provider.And that means you have choices of how much to sell your electricity for and how to participate.So you can, as an energy ecovillage, end up having a big impact on the transition.And also improve their own security and sovereignty in terms of energy at the same time with not a huge amount of investment.that's fantastic well that's excellent yeah you know ty in terms of this i know that there is eco anxiety i know that there is concern because yes the the globe is using more energy we are unfortunately using more fossil fuels and you know the kyoto and the paris agreements those those targets kyoto and paris agreementsPrecisely, you know, and so and when you get fixated, as we all should, but when you get fixated on 1.5 C, you know, and the possibility of 2 C and so on and so forth, it gets to be a little bit much.But I was thinking, as you and I were talking, really, there is so much hope here.And, you know, it's it's so difficult to see the progress when you're just in the middle of it.It's, you know, it's like being in a game and you can't step back and see the beauty of it or see the progress that's being made.So it, you know, just like the computer boom, which would just absolutely exploded and went on and on andI think that for batteries, just like solar panels, this is just the beginning.Like batteries have been around for so long, butBillions upon billions upon billions of dollars of big money, smart money looking for returns has just begun to invest.And I think only good things are coming.And with the different categories of battery, all the different types of batteries, each fulfilling their own niche, as you indicated, you know, the short duration, the medium duration and the long-term duration.I think that we can all look at this as a very hopeful time.In 5 years, 7 years, ten years, it's going to be different.We are going to see progress because it's happening right now.Yeah, and as you said, with computers, with solar technology, we've seen the pattern before.Cars coming in, bicycles before that in theyou have a bunch of designs that people are experimenting with.And over time and over experimentation, we get closer and closer to the mature tech, to this kind of stabilized general format that now is an integral part of life that people wouldn't know how to do without.And it's going to be just as transformative as bicycles or cars.Thank you very much.That's excellent, Ty.Thank you very much.The great explanation today and look forward to talking to you in the next one.Yeah, you too.And thank all of you for listening.