Today, lithium-ion batteries are the default option to retailer vitality in gadgets from laptops to electrical autos. The price of those sorts of batteries has plummeted over the previous decade, however there’s a rising want for even cheaper choices. Solar panels and wind generators solely produce vitality intermittently, and to maintain {an electrical} grid powered by these renewable sources buzzing across the clock, grid operators want methods to retailer that vitality till it’s wanted. The US grid alone might have between 225 and 460 gigawatts of long-duration vitality storage capability by 2050.
New batteries, just like the zinc-based know-how Eos hopes to commercialize, may retailer electrical energy for hours and even days at low price. These and different different storage techniques may very well be key to constructing a constant provide of electrical energy for the grid and chopping the local weather impacts of energy era around the globe.
In Eos’s batteries, the cathode isn’t constructed from the acquainted combination of lithium and different metals. Instead, the first ingredient is zinc, which ranks because the fourth most produced metallic on the planet.
Zinc-based batteries aren’t a brand new invention—researchers at Exxon patented zinc-bromine circulate batteries within the Seventies—however Eos has developed and altered the know-how during the last decade.
Zinc-halide batteries have a number of potential advantages over lithium-ion choices, says Francis Richey, vice chairman of analysis and growth at Eos. “It’s a fundamentally different way to design a battery, really, from the ground up,” he says.
Eos’s batteries use a water-based electrolyte (the liquid that strikes cost round in a battery) as an alternative of natural solvent, which makes them extra secure and means they gained’t catch hearth, Richey says. The firm’s batteries are additionally designed to have an extended lifetime than lithium-ion cells—about 20 years versus 10 to fifteen—and don’t require as many security measures, like lively temperature management.
There are some technical challenges that zinc-based and different different batteries might want to overcome to make it to the grid, says Kara Rodby, technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, a enterprise capital agency centered on vitality storage know-how. Zinc batteries have a comparatively low effectivity—that means extra vitality might be misplaced throughout charging and discharging than occurs in lithium-ion cells. Zinc-halide batteries also can fall sufferer to undesirable chemical reactions that will shorten the batteries’ lifetime in the event that they’re not managed.