US federal cash is on its way to fund research into long-duration energy storage using lead-acid batteries.
A consortium backed by industry bodies Battery Council International and the Consortium for Battery Innovation, will conduct pre-competitive research aimed at improving lead battery performance. Companies participating in the consortium include Advanced Battery Concepts, C&D/Trojan, Clarios, Crown Battery, East Penn Manufacturing, EnerSys, Gridtential and Stryten Energy. The collaborating national laboratories are Argonne, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest (PNNL).
The $5 million award from the US Department of Energy, announced on 27 September, will support work to develop lead batteries capable of 10+ hours of storage with a pathway to $0.05/kWh levelised cost of storage by 2030. The companies will put $2.5 million into the research.
BCI’s technical director Tim Ellis, formerly technical director at Ecobat, told BEST in an interview the three-year programme will combine advanced techno-economic analysis with fundamental materials science research.
“We have two technical issues we’re trying to work on,” he said. “One is cycle life, which is extremely important…The more cycles you get out of a battery, the less cost it is per unit, per kilowatt hour of storage. So we’re working on extending cycle life, and the other one that we’re working on is increasing the capacity utilisation of lead batteries. And we’re trying to get over 70% capacity utilisation at over 5,000 cycles. That’s the goal.”
Argonne will study the accumulation of various sulphates and oxides and check failure mechanisms within the battery, he said. As 5,000 cycles will take the battery past retirement, the laboratory will build models to predict battery cycles.
Work will be done on crystallisation behaviour at Oak Ridge before final analysis of the batteries for failure.
The information will then be used to build a techno-economic model for lead batteries in a specific long-duration energy storage space, Ellis said. The project is tasked with achieving LDES electricity pricing of $0.05/KWh. Ellis said things are close to $0.075/KWh.
Ellis believes the project is a big deal. “Having the DOE recognise that lead technology is important to the continuation of growing the energy diversification economy is a big deal for our industry.”
Photo: Argonne National Laboratory chemist Karena Chapman peers inside the vacuum tank of the new high-energy Si Laue monochromator recently installed on x-ray beamline 11-ID-B of the Argonne Advanced Photon Source. Peter Chupas, Argonne
