Making hay (not just) when the sun shines

A grid powered by repurposed Humvees? You never know.

Let’s hear it for California! Among the findings of its special report on grid battery storage, we learned that during a recent heatwave grid batteries provided 2.4 percent of the power during the evenings to keep those cool Californians, er, cool. A small amount perhaps, but we also learn that grid storage in the Golden State has grown tenfold since 2020, so it’s definitely on the up.

Grid battery storage capacity in the California ISO (CAISO) region. Image: CAISO.

But let’s not get too hyped over here just yet. As Tim Rogers told us in his guest post for The Green Edge last week, while the California grid might be able to charge up its batteries when the sun (mostly) shines and then discharge when the folks come home, countries like the UK will need new technologies to deal with long duration storage and resolve the obvious problem of renewables not always generating electricity when it’s needed.

Average hourly battery schedules 2022 (MW). Image: TGE from CAISO.

So where will these new technologies come from? Well, in Britain of course we have the Faraday Battery Challenge, with its half a billion pounds plus change of public funding taking it up to 2025. It tells us:

The UK and the EU have established clear end dates [erm…- Ed] for the sale of non zero emission vehicles, which is driving the demand for battery powered electric vehicles. Batteries are crucial for decarbonising transportation, not only in the automotive sector but with applications across sectors such as aerospace, rail, marine, off-highway vehicles and static storage. The transition to an electrified future will require many types of batteries, with some yet to be imagined. The next generation of battery technology must be explored to ensure long-term UK success, in line with development and de-risking of production processes.

Source: Faraday

Alongside that we have the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK leveraging something like £5 billion into close on 200 projects around hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, power systems, and motors and drives. And in our post the other week we mentioned the Tata gigafactory in Somerset and Sunderland’s second Envision battery plant.

But hang on, this is pretty much all about transport, isn’t it? Don’t get us wrong, this is all good stuff and excellent for making sure the M25 becomes a relatively fume-free car park during its busier times, albeit at a time when the Environmental Audit Committee has taken the Government to task (again) for only being concerned with increasing supply and not doing anything about managing demand.

“…in June 2022 the then Minister for Aviation told us that he ruled out introducing new taxes to manage aviation demand, and in February this year the Environment Secretary made it clear to us that she was not contemplating any measures to reduce meat consumption.”

Source: EAC letter to Government, 29 September 2023

But, while grid batteries might not have the glitz and glamour potential of batteries for transport, we are seeing batteries getting into the National Grid through more distributed efforts. For example, Tag Energy tells us it’s built a 99 MW battery facility near Luton, in association with Harmony Energy and with funding from Santander UK. And Invinity is splashing a bit of DESNZ cash to build what it claims will be the largest grid-scale battery ever manufactured in the UK.

Sticking batteries on the Grid makes eminently decent sense: like dogs and people, wind turbines are best when they’re put to work so they can’t get up to mischief. And right now, it seems Britain’s 11,500 or so wind turbines are spending (and costing) a fair chunk of their time twiddling their blades and humming quietly to themselves.

Tesla’s in the grid storage game, of course, and going back to the aforementioned Tag-Harmony facility, we note that the batteries are Tesla Megapacks. Repurposed from EV’s perhaps? Unlikely – but they soon could be. Riffling through the Faraday Challenge’s multiplicity of projects, among the rafts of innovation on cells and materials (33 projects), modules, packs and battery management systems (31), and beyond Li-ion (23), we find a small group of eight projects looking at second life and recycling. Most, if not all of these second-life projects are closed now, and to be honest we haven’t been able to find much information on them. But reading through the Faraday blurb we learned a couple of interesting things: first, that by 2040 the global EV revolution could create enough battery waste to fill Wembley Stadium almost 20 times every year (which would probably be more interesting to watch than the football); and, second, EV batteries still retain 70% capacity after their first lives in EVs.

So, come on, what are we going to do with all these perhaps cranky but still spirited 70 percent-ers? Well, grid storage for sure, and in the wider sense for homes and businesses where excess renewable energy can be stored and discharged when needed. But there’s much more: as backup power supplies in critical facilities like hospitals and data centres, providing protection against outages and reducing the use of fossil-fuelled generators; as off-grid power systems used in remote locations which have unreliable (and uneconomic) access to the national grid; as mobile charging systems for use in temporary events and disasters where grid supplies are difficult to achieve; for electric boats and ships like Ellen, who we wrote about last year; in second-life EVs and other forms of mobility like e-scooters or e-bikes; in certain types of industrial equipment in places like in warehouses and controlled environments; in telecommunications where masts are difficult to connect to the grid; and in rural electrification where access to electricity is limited, like we see in some developing countries.

And, at the end of all that, when the battery has truly gone to meet its maker, there’s recycling, the battery equivalent of the organ donor scheme to harvest the cobalt, lithium, nickel and whatever else can be saved from landfill.

What we’re seeing emerge elsewhere in the world is a pretty clear view that the battery industry is a core pillar of economic competitiveness, decarbonisation, and even national security. We find it, for example, in the USA’s National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries (June 2021), which sets one of its five goals as being to ‘enable U.S. end-of-life reuse and critical materials recycling at scale and a full competitive value chain in the U.S.’ and confirms that ‘beyond the recycling supply, spent EV battery cells can be transitioned to second-use applications, including grid storage’. By the way, it also has a decent go at quantifying the benefits of recycling at the end of the reuse value chain:

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

The U.S. Military, and in particular the army, is also in on the game. It’s seeking to make Duracell bunnies out of its 170,000 non-tactical cars and trucks, while something like a quarter of a million wheeled tactical vehicles will become hybrids. Hybrid Humvees, nice! But this all suggests to us that across the pond at least, public procurement will be a key driver for mushrooming battery R&D and manufacturing dollars.

We already know about some of the big jobs and skills implications of all this and have posted previously on the fine work being done by the European Alliance for Batteries Technology, Training and Skills (ALBATTS) project and its 26 skills cards. But what strikes us most is how deep and wide the battery industry might be, in both the UK and beyond. From lithium mining in Cornwall and County Durham, to maritime harvesting of raw materials, to materials scientists and chemical engineers. And all that’s before we even get to manufacturing a single one of the bally things.

Image: Waste360

When we think about the battery skills supply chain, we realise the scale of the transformation across many industries – not just automotive – and how they will need to not only get their brains and resources around totally different power systems, but will also need to figure out supply chains that handle previously unknown materials, are exposed to the vagaries of commodity pricing and the potential instability of supplier countries, and have properly circular business models mandated from the off.

But the benefits – in terms of jobs at least – could be huge, with each extra GWh bringing between 90 and 180 direct jobs in battery production with a further 350 to 1,400 indirect jobs, according to a 2021 report from EIT and Fraunhofer. Worldwide this could mean up to 3 million jobs, with around 10 percent of those being in Europe.

Wishing all batteries, everywhere, long and fruitful lives.