By Akshat Rathi, Paul Murray and Rachael Dottle April 27, 2021

​Batteries took over the modern world without changing all that much.

A smartphone, by comparison, has far less in common with the mainframe computers that preceded it. Same goes for the Tesla Model 3 and the Ford Model T. But lithium-ion technology used in today’s batteries has sustained decades of exponential growth—moving from gadgets to electric vehicles, and even spawning a few billionaires along the way—without major changes to its structure since Sony first commercialized the technology in 1991.

That’s not because chemists haven’t tried. It’s just that developing new materials that perform to industrial standards is a very hard problem.

All batteries have four components: two electrodes (anode and cathode), a liquid electrolyte that helps ions move between the electrodes, and a separator to keep the electrodes from coming in direct contact with each other and preventing fires. When a battery is charged, ions flow from the cathode to the anode. When it’s discharged, the ions reverse course.

​Energy is stored in chemical bonds between lithium and the other components. It’s converted into electrical energy when the battery is in use.

Charged lithium atoms move from the anode to the cathode, causing electrons to move externally. That’s what powers a device.
As the world moves to rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions, the race is on to plug more things into ever more powerful batteries: power grids, trucks, ships, and even airplanes. The innerspace of this crucial technology is finally poised to see dramatic changes, with a number of secretive startups promising breakthroughs. QuantumScape Corp. claims to have created a new battery material that would allow electric cars to travel further and charge much faster—and as a result the startup has a valuation that’s ranged between $13 billion and $20 billion in recent weeks, even without any revenue in sight. Its rivals, including giants like Samsung and Panasonic, are also chasing next-generation batteries.

Before we reach the battery future, it’s important to understand the physical evolution of today’s lithium-ion tech. Billions of people experience phones with faster recharging and cars with longer range, but few of us can explain what’s behind these improvements. It’s a story of tweaks: small efficiencies in manufacturing, small improvements in materials, and small gains in performance.

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As battery power becomes more viable in the quest to green the grid, it’s incumbent on business leaders across industries and continents to share the best practices that will help advance the clean-energy transition.
Thanks to increased R&D spending that has advanced the core science, the cost of lithium-ion batteries is plummeting. Already at record lows, the price of battery power could be halved again by mid-decade, meaning that the math of whether or not it makes economic sense to use battery power will likely soon be settled in the span of just one car-leasing cycle.​
As rare-earth element producers like China and Australia turn to protectionist policies, access to the raw materials that go into batteries is increasingly becoming a geopolitical issue. This may inspire a move to supply chains that are closer to home, along with more investment in emerging markets.

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The cost of harvesting solar energy has dropped so much in recent years that it's giving traditional energy sources a run for their money. However, the challenges of energy storage -- which require the capacity to bank an intermittent and seasonally variable supply of solar energy -- have kept the technology from being economically competitive.

Cornell University researchers led by Lynden Archer, Dean and Professor of Engineering, have been exploring the use of low-cost materials to create rechargeable batteries that will make energy storage more affordable. Now, they have shown that a new technique incorporating aluminum results in rechargeable batteries that offer up to 10,000 error-free cycles.

This new kind of battery could provide a safer and more environmentally friendly alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which currently dominate the market but are slow to charge and have a knack for catching fire.

The team's paper, "Regulating Electrodeposition Morphology in High-Capacity Aluminium and Zinc Battery Anodes Using Interfacial Metal-Substrate Bonding," published in Nature Energy.

Among the advantages of aluminum is that it is abundant in the earth's crust, it is trivalent and light, and it therefore has a high capacity to store more energy than many other metals. However, aluminum can be tricky to integrate into a battery's electrodes. It reacts chemically with the glass fiber separator, which physically divides the anode and the cathode, causing the battery to short circuit and fail.

The researchers' solution was to design a substrate of interwoven carbon fibers that forms an even stronger chemical bond with aluminum. When the battery is charged, the aluminum is deposited into the carbon structure via covalent bonding, i.e., the sharing of electron pairs between aluminum and carbon atoms.

While electrodes in conventional rechargeable batteries are only two dimensional, this technique uses a three-dimensional -- or nonplanar -- architecture and creates a deeper, more consistent layering of aluminum that can be finely controlled.

The aluminum-anode batteries can be reversibly charged and discharged one or more orders of magnitude more times than other aluminum rechargeable batteries under practical conditions.

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Materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by David Nutt. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

South Africans looking to purchase a backup power solution should be careful when considering suitable batteries.
The prevalence of load-shedding has led many to resort to battery-inverter systems that are able to charge when the power is on and then provide stored electricity for use during power cuts.

These battery systems are also used to store energy generated from renewable energy solutions like solar power.

Understanding the specifications of these batteries can be difficult for those unfamiliar with electrical systems, however.

Batteries that aren’t rated to perform as advertised are in the market, and even those who buy from respected sellers should be wary of misleading performance ratings.

Blue Nova Energy, which recently launched its MegaBoy intelligent Energy Storage Solution (iESS), told MyBroadband what to look out for – detailed below.

The problem with battery specifications
Certain vendors used load-shedding to exploit a lack of knowledge among consumers to sell battery products that aren’t necessarily intended for backup power.

While many vendors don’t explicitly lie about a battery’s specifications, subtle manipulations in how the performance factors are calculated can misconstrue its true capability.

“A lower-quality product can be made to look better on paper by obscuring or neglecting to mention certain product specifics, and therefore seem to be more affordable,” Blue Nova explained.

The company said that consumers tend to compare product prices, rather than taking long-term product running costs into consideration.

“The data available on the data sheets of these products is, for the most part, accurate. The difficulty is determining what the published data is based on exactly,” said Blue Nova.

“For instance, minimum cycle life depends mainly on chemistry, maximum daily depth of discharge (DoD) percentage, ambient temperature, and capacity retention at end-of-life.”

“The latter is sometimes mentioned in small-print in warranty documents,” the company added.

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In a big first step for Africa, the utility looks to procure 360 megawatts/1,440 megawatt-hours of storage capacity by 2021.
South Africa’s utility Eskom is preparing to launch a tender for 1.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will need to be installed by December 2021.

The large-scale energy storage tender, the first of its kind in the country and in Africa as a whole, will be split into two phases, with an initial 200 megawatts/800 megawatt-hours of capacity to be built by December 2020, an Eskom official said. 

This first phase of implementation will be divided into four packages, and will be followed by 160 megawatts/640 megawatt-hours to be installed a year later, Prince Moyo, general manager for power delivery engineering at Eskom, said during a Wednesday webinar.

The second phase will include 60 megawatts of solar to be integrated with the battery storage, along with an asset performance management system.

The tender has already been approved by South Africa’s Ministry of Finance, Moyo said. The only ministry that has not yet signed off is the Department of Public Enterprises, Moyo added. That consent “has been escalated to the highest level,” he said, without committing to a launch date for the solicitation. “It’s imminent,” he said.

Moyo called the battery tender “a flagship project” for Eskom, which supplies around 90 percent of South Africa’s electricity via more than 45 gigawatts of generation. “We are moving toward cleaner power,” he said.

The planned battery solicitation follows a 2010 loan agreement with the World Bank and other lenders for the development of a 100-megawatt concentrated solar power plant, Kiwano, with energy storage.

When this project failed to materialize, Eskom began looking into other ways to fulfill the loan agreement, said Moyo. The utility put forward a proposal to use distributed battery storage in 2017.

Frederic Verdol, World Bank Group senior power engineer, said the battery tender was also a first for the bank. “Eskom wanted to be proactive,” he said. “This was a key thing for us because it’s in line with the original objectives of the project.”

The scope of the technology-agnostic procurement will include battery operations and maintenance and physical security such as access control and alarm systems.

For the first phase of procurement, Eskom has developed its own battery energy storage system specification and taken care of site selection, environmental approvals, land acquisition and National Energy Regulator licensing, Moyo said.

“We have also done some concept design,” he stated.

The winning bidder will be expected to verify Eskom’s technical studies and provide detailed designs before implementing the battery plant, said Moyo. Eskom has identified eight potential sites for the first phase of procurement, subject to due diligence.

Site selection for the second phase of procurement is underway, with fewer than 10 sites now under consideration, Moyo revealed.

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South Africa’s utility Eskom is preparing to launch a tender for 1.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will need to be installed by December 2021.
The large-scale energy storage tender, the first of its kind in the country and in Africa as a whole, will be split into two phases, with an initial 200 megawatts/800 megawatt-hours of capacity to be built by December 2020, an Eskom official said. 

This first phase of implementation will be divided into four packages, and will be followed by 160 megawatts/640 megawatt-hours to be installed a year later, Prince Moyo, general manager for power delivery engineering at Eskom, said during a Wednesday webinar.

The second phase will include 60 megawatts of solar to be integrated with the battery storage, along with an asset performance management system.

This first phase of implementation will be divided into four packages, and will be followed by 160 megawatts/640 megawatt-hours to be installed a year later, Prince Moyo, general manager for power delivery engineering at Eskom, said during a Wednesday webinar.

The second phase will include 60 megawatts of solar to be integrated with the battery storage, along with an asset performance management system.

The tender has already been approved by South Africa’s Ministry of Finance, Moyo said. The only ministry that has not yet signed off is the Department of Public Enterprises, Moyo added. That consent “has been escalated to the highest level,” he said, without committing to a launch date for the solicitation. “It’s imminent,” he said.

Moyo called the battery tender “a flagship project” for Eskom, which supplies around 90 percent of South Africa’s electricity via more than 45 gigawatts of generation. “We are moving toward cleaner power,” he said.

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Since 2013, the residential energy storage business has been dominated by Germany. However, all could change as other countries further developments creating a competitive market.
As new residential markets gain momentum, German markets could be facing great competition.

As the market leader, German’s success, in the residential energy storage, can be accredited to vast amounts of support and funding. Germany has been benefiting from Europe’s largest energy storage subsidies which was made available by KfW national bank, who’s total asset worth is €472.3 billion.

Since funding began, the market has grown from nothing to over 125,000 systems. However, the funding is believe to just be responsibly for the market ‘getting on it’s feet. This is because, according to data from RWTH Aachen University in Germany, in 2018 only 4% of the German residential energy storage business were reliant on the KfW subsidies. This is a colossal difference to 2015 where roughly 55% of the industry was reliant on the KfW subsidies.

Countries like Australia are soon to follow suit. Due to increasing local policy support and further renewable and energy storage targets. The targets are applied to five of the six Australian state, indicating a possible spike in the Australian side of the residential energy storage game.

Installation in California are also thriving. This is due to the new ‘Self-Generation Incentive Program’, a budget set aside for the residential segment in 2017.

Luke Gear and Dr Xiaoxi He issued a report for IDTechEx named Batteries for Stationary Energy Storage 2019-2029. The report investigates the growth of the energy storage business. The Gear and He said: “2018 was a remarkable year for stationary energy storage. Governments and policymakers around the world are beginning to wake up to the value batteries can offer to the grid, both in terms of flexibility and decarbonisation. Over 6GWh was deployed, and market leaders such as Tesla expect to double their deployments for 2019.”

Another huge fuel price hike, another pending electricity price jump. Just another day in sunny South Africa. The trouble with energy prices is that when they go up, the price of everything else goes up, but when they go down, other prices don’t.

The energy situation in South Africa is unsustainable and it is not just the poor and working class who are suffering, the entire economy is feeling the pain. It is just a matter of time before it reaches the verge of collapse, unless we do something urgently.

Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon or, more accurately, in the sky.

In my previous article I wrote about breakthroughs in solar power technology. A few months ago, I wrote about electric cars and their amazing capabilities.
These two technologies are potentially world-changing and in a few years they will transform the world’s economies in unimaginable ways.

Consider an average household of the future: all the power needed to run a house will be generated via solar power. But this power will not come from the national grid, it will be generated by the house itself. The average home of the future will be off-grid. In fact, in many places this is already a reality.

American company Tesla has developed a range of roof tiles that look like plain old concrete roof tiles, but are highly efficient solar panels capable of generating electricity for domestic use.

Made with tempered glass, Tesla claims its solar roof tiles are more than three times stronger than standard roofing tiles. Its website says: “Glass solar tiles are so durable they are guaranteed for the lifetime of your house, or infinity, whichever comes first.”

Although domestic solar panels have been around for some time, the trouble with them, as with solar power in general, is that there isn’t a way to store the generated electricity.

Excess electricity is wasted, and when the sun goes down, no electricity is generated at all.

As a result, power grids have to resort to “traditional” power sources such as coal and nuclear power stations.

But that is about to change.

​Towards the end of 2016, areas in South Australia faced wide-scale blackouts and load shedding after extremely violent storms knocked out power transmission towers. Since the area is remote, there weren’t sufficient alternative lines to re-route the power, and the problem persisted, affecting thousands of homes and businesses.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, became aware of this and tweeted a solution: build the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery.

He claimed the battery would be able to supply the entire region with backup power whenever the grid went out. He further claimed he could build it in 100 days.

The Aussies took Musk up on his offer. Despite vehement opposition from some of Australia’s senior politicians, such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the 100MWh/129MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve was officially commissioned on December 1, 2017. The battery would be owned and operated by French renewable energy provider Neoen.

The “Big Battery”, as it is called, cost nearly A$100m (R1.06billion) to build, but by the end of last year, the Australian energy market operator reported that it had saved almost A$40million in grid costs.

Big Battery catapulted South Australia into a world leader in power storage and, due to its success, Tesla has received a number of orders for similar installations. All that from a single tweet.

Tesla is also the leader in the domestic power storage industry. Its Powerwall unit is a large battery especially designed for homes and is powerful enough to run a home with all its appliances, including air conditioners. Unlike most battery backup systems, the Powerwall connects to the power mains, not to a limited number of lights.

Although the Powerwall can operate on its own as a backup system, it ideally pairs with the roof tile solar panels to operate as a complete power solution. It provides about 7kWh, which means an average family of four will require just two batteries for normal overnight usage.

For many American families, the solar roof tiles and Powerwalls are not just powering their homes, but their electric cars, too.

The obvious benefit is a huge monthly saving in electricity and fuel costs, but the wider ramifications are mind-bending to consider.

Traditional power stations will become a thing of the past, while the entire crude oil industry will collapse, with all the nastiness that goes with it, such as the cartels, middlemen, price-fixing, oil wars and, of course, environmental hazard. Petrol stations will be replaced by charging stations.

All our energy will come from the most natural, abundant and renewable source: the sun, and for the first time in more than a 100 years, energy production will be truly democratised and out of the hands of a greedy few.

* Bilal Kathrada is an educational technologist, speaker, author, newspaper columnist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of CompuKids, a start-up that teaches children Computer Science skills. Bilal blogs at www.bilalkat.com.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

Cape Argus

Attractive costs for solar and wind power and cutting-edge innovations are making clean energy a compelling proposition in Sub-Saharan Africa, which faces the world’s largest gaps in electricity access. But solar and wind power are variable by nature, making it essential to find effective ways to store the electricity they produce to use when it is needed most.

Energy storage – batteries in particular – can help solve that problem.

Today, battery technology is costly and not widely deployed in large-scale energy projects. The gap is particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly 600 million people still live without access to reliable and affordable electricity, despite the region’s significant wind and solar power potential and burgeoning energy demand.

Catalyzing new markets will be key to drive down costs for batteries and make it a viable energy storage solution in Africa.

A recent partner- and investor-focused conference sought to do just that.

The “Batteries, Energy Storage & the Renewable Future” event in Cape Town on Feb. 24 and 25 was attended by more than 200 participants from companies including Tesla, General Electric, Fluence, Siemens, the Southern Africa Power Pool, and national research labs and utilities from many countries.

South Africa’s Minister for Energy, Mr. Jeff Radebe, delivered opening remarks, and underscored the country’s commitment to the application of battery storage in its energy systems.

The event focused on the potential for batteries and other forms of energy storage to complement renewable energy by supporting off-grid and mini grids, which supply electricity to millions of people living in remote communities or areas that are not supported by traditional infrastructure.

It also demonstrated the tremendous demand that exists in the region today for energy solutions that do not just boost the uptake of clean energy, but also help stabilize and strengthen existing electricity grids and aid the global push to adopt more clean energy and fight against climate change.

Global demand for battery storage is expected to reach 2,300 GWh by 2030, while power systems around the world will need nearly ten times more — 22,000 GWh — of storage capacity by 2050 to integrate more wind and solar energy into the electricity grid.

The World Bank is already taking steps to address this growing need.
​

​A new, first-of-its-kind $1 billion World Bank Group (WBG) program aims to help fast-track investments in battery storage by raising $4 billion more in public and private funds and convening a global think tank with the ultimate goal of financing 17.5 GWh of battery storage by 2025 – more than triple the 4-5 GWh currently installed in all developing countries.

“Last year, almost twice as many energy storage projects were announced globally – and the same is expected this year. The market is still small, but exponential growth has begun,” said Michael Solomon, the Chief Executive Officer of Clean Horizon.

To that end, the World Bank, in partnership with the Climate Technology Fund (CTF) and the African Development Bank, will support a large-scale distributed battery storage program in South Africa.

The WBG is also developing solar parks with 150 MW of PV and some 200 MWh battery storage each in Mali and Burkina Faso – the largest in the region. Other projects include a combined solar and battery storage project in Haiti, an emergency solar and battery storage power plant in the Gambia and mini-grids in island states to improve resilience.

In recent years, the WBG has also been working with other countries to support the deployment of batteries with solar and wind power, with projects currently under preparation in Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The World Bank event, “Batteries, Energy Storage & the Renewable Future,” was held in Cape Town, South Africa on Feb. 25-26, 2019 with the support of the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) and the Middle East and North Africa Knowledge and Innovation Program (MENA KIP).

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The Coega Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is at an advanced stage of setting up factories that will supply gigawatt factories with manganese, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries.

Coega Development Corporation (CDC) business development metallurgic sector manager Sadick Davids says the SEZ is the “most ideal location in terms of readiness for the beneficiation of the base material for this industry”.

He added that the Coega SEZ has the infrastructure nodes in place to provide services for exporting manganese, as well as the skills capacity.

The local industry, Davids notes, is known for historical battery manufacturing such as Eveready Batteries, in Port Elizabeth.

From a jobs perspective, the value chain in the development of manganese at Coega for the battery or energy storage markets has the potential to create more than 10 000 direct jobs and 15 000 indirect jobs plus an investment value of more than R20-billion.

“What makes Coega SEZ an ideal location for the manufacturing of lithium-ion battery capacity is experience in this sector. The CDC is also located near the Nelson Mandela University which could provide research based insight for advancing and growing the sector,” highlights Davids.

The university is already a key technology player and boasts a testing facility specifically for battery development, while the CDC’s partnership with other key State institutions in the province is making headway for the first investment in lithium-ion battery factories within the next two years.

“The CDC believes the local production of manganese-based batteries will position the Eastern Cape to benefit from the emerging energy storage and electric mobility or e-mobility markets,” adds CDC energy sector manager Sandisiwe Ncemane.

The urgent relocation of the current manganese facility from the Port of Port Elizabeth to Ngqura will serve as an enabler to the Coega SEZ, which has the capacity and infrastructure for a battery storage and manufacturing, Ncemane concluded. 

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