Another battery entry, Ambri with a liquid metal battery and $50 million
startup funding, understands it’s the battery market vs. fossil fuels.
And batteries plus sun, wind, and water power will win.
Like Tesla’s Powerpack, Ambri’s liquid-metal battery is designed to
provide grid-level storage that can supplement intermittent
renewables like solar and wind, making a grid that depends on
renewables as reliable as one that depends on fossil fuels or
nuclear reactors.
Wednesday night, [Ambri founder MIT Professor Donald] Sadoway welcomed Tesla’s entry to the grid-level
battery industry. The competition, he said, is not between
batteries, but between batteries and fossil fuels.
MIT Prof. Donald Sadoway thinks he’s found a way to build electric-grid-scale batteries out of dirt.
Electric utilities complain solar and wind power are not baseload, capacity, energy sources because they are intermittent. You know, if they weren’t busy running up cost overruns that could easily exceed the entire annual budget of the state of Georgia, maybe the utilities could solve this problem. Meanwhile, Prof. Sadoway, instead of looking for the snazziest coolest most efficient new method of energy storage, defined the problem in terms of the market:
the demanding performance requirements of the grid, namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime, and super low cost. We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap.
Then he set parameters on the solution:
If you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt. Preferably dirt that’s locally sourced.
He cast about for possible precedents and found aluminum smelting gave him some ideas for using low density liquid metal at the top, high density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between. Choosing the right metals is the trick, which he thinks he’s found: magnesium at the top, and antimony at the bottom.
Is Sadoway right? Will his battery work at grid scale? I don’t know. But he’s asking the right questions, and it’s worth a try.
Has Dr. Sadoway achieved the holy grail of renewable energy? Judge for yourself. Our attention is compelled by the degree of his certainty and the seeming simplicity of the approach. Watch MIT’s Donald Sadoway explain his vision here (link).
Seems to me there are at least two major approaches:
Jeff McMahon, Forbes, 4 June 2015,
Want To Build A Better Battery? Don’t Talk To Battery Experts,
