Grid Power Storage

Hot Liquid Metal Grid Battery Mg Sb (Ambri)

Electro-chemical energy genius and MIT professor Donald Sadoway is in the process of commercializing a liquid metal grid scale energy storage technology he developed for low cost large scale industrial use. His major design objective was to use two abundant and inexpensive metals, and he did so and modeled the battery as a reverse design of an aluminum smelter (ie gigantic industrial scale and low cost). This battery technology will enable intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar to provide continuous uninterrupted base loading capacity 24 hours a day every day of the year. 


The technology is so promising that Bill Gates has personally backed the company along with Khosla Ventures and French oil conglomerate Total.  This technology will literally enable clean renewable energy sources to replace toxic coal and antiquated nuclear power energy sources for base load capacity in national electric grids all over the world :)

The Energy Storage Module:
Each cell is a 1200Wh unit, which is assembled into a 100kWh stack, which is then assembled into a 2MWh Energy Storage Module (40ft standard shipping container).


These batteries are operated "hot" at a temperature that keeps the lighter liquid magnesium layer floating on top of the molten electrolyte salt layer, which floats above the liquid antimony layer.

The advantage of running the battery hot is that the components have extremely high calendar and cycle lives because the anode and cathode and electrolyte layers are density separated liquids that automatically configure into a battery cell and are not subject to any of the failure modes of low temperatures conventional batteries.

These liquid metal batteries can absorb tremendous amounts of energy quickly, which actually heats them automatically, and discharge the energy tremendously quickly, which also keeps them hot. By designing the battery to operate hot, all of the thermal management problems and failure modes of conventional batteries are avoided.  This technology also makes use of low cost abundant materials (magnesium, salt and antimony) : which contrasts against the far less abundant and far more costly Lithium Cobalt Manganese Phosphorous Fluoride PET resources used in conventional high energy capacity batteries.

http://www.ambri.com/

Cost Efficient Grid Energy Storage FTW