A rapid-charging and non-flammable battery developed in part by 2019 Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough has been licensed for development by the Canadian electric utility Hydro-Québec. The utility says it hopes to have the technology ready for one or more commercial partners in two years.
Hydro-Québec, according to Karim Zaghib, general director of the utility’s Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage, has been commercializing patents with Goodenough’s parent institution, the University of Texas at Austin, for the past 25 years.
As Spectrum reported in 2017, Goodenough and Maria Helena Braga, professor of engineering at the University of Porto in Portugal, developed a solid-state lithium rechargeable that used a glass doped with alkali metals as the battery’s electrolyte. (The electrolyte is the material between cathode and anode and is often a liquid in today’s batteries, which typically means it’s also flammable and potentially vulnerable to battery fires.)
Braga said her and Goodenough’s battery is high capacity, charges in “minutes rather than hours,” performs well in both hot and cold weather, and that its solid-state electrolyte is not flammable.
“For the next two years we do research and development in order to prove the concept and to scale the materials,” Zaghib said.
Hydro-Québec’s research lab, which Zaghib says comprises 120 people, works with both early-stage technologies like the Goodenough glass battery and also with technologies already at commercial scale.
This latter category includes another Goodenough invention, the lithium iron phosphate battery.
“This is one of the safest materials for lithium ion today,” Zaghib said. “It’s used for electric buses and for energy storage.”
Beginning in 1996, Zaghib says, Goodenough and Hydro-Québec struck up a partnership to commercialize this lithium battery. Licensees of this technology include the now Chinese-owned A123 and the Japanese battery company Murata Manufacturing.
Zaghib says that although the utility has been researching lithium batteries since 1967, it’s currently concentrating only on solid-state batteries. The Goodenough/Braga glass battery is what Zaghib calls a “third-generation” solid-state battery.
Hydro-Québec does have a so-called “first-generation” solid-state battery already in the marketplace, Zaghib said.
“Blue Solutions is a French company using our lithium polymer license … for electric buses and energy storage,” he said.
The utility’s first-generation lithium battery dates back, Zaghib said, to more than 40 years ago. “Hydro-Québec was the first company to work on true lithium batteries in 1979,” he said.
The utility recently announced that it’s working with Daimler Benz to develop a second-generation lithium solid-state battery.
Month: June 2020
Patti Poppe on Big Data and Optimizing Energy Use
Patti Poppe is CEO of CMS Energy, the country’s 10th largest utility, last time I looked, based in Jackson, MI.
Here’s part of her recent presentation dealing with the implications of bigger, better data in managing the “demand side” of the generation equation – game changer for utilities globally.
“We were walking through people’s backyards to figure out how much energy they were using a month,” says Ms. Poppe, also the CEO of Consumers parent CMS Energy. “Technology has evolved to the point where we can optimize energy usage for the first time.”
The focus on managing energy consumption seems counterintuitive for a company that earns much of its revenue by selling electrons. But for Consumers, it’s key to making sure demand matches supply as it replaces large, carbon-intensive power sources with smaller, cleaner ones that will cost less to operate and put it ahead of many other utilities in slashing carbon emissions. It’s also necessary to prepare for a future where utilities sell less power but have a greater hand in coordinating its usage through services billed to customers.
For decades, utilities in much of the world have enjoyed monopoly status as the sole entities providing and delivering electricity. Now they are being forced to change as businesses and homeowners install solar panels, batteries to store that solar power, and other generation options that reduce dependence on the utility. Electricity consumption has also plateaued in many parts of the U.S. due to energy-efficiency improvements, creating a need for the companies to generate profits through more than just selling power.
All of that means revenue growth has slowed for utilities at a time when many are under pressure from customers, regulators and lawmakers to repair deteriorating power grids built for last century’s population boom and to reconfigure them for a lower-consumption, lower-carbon future. The question utility executives face is how to make those massive infrastructure investments and not bleed customers dry with rate increases when it’s easier than ever for those customers to defect.
“It’s a huge challenge, and the smart utilities are going to have to invest with that long-term vision of having a much more decentralized grid,” says Michael Wara, head of the climate- and energy-policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute.
For Consumers, the plan involves generating more than half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2040, up from 11% last year. To do so, and offset losses from plant closures, it plans to add six gigawatts of solar power—requiring a total of 59 square miles of solar panels clustered across its service territory—as well as a smaller amount of wind power. Increasingly, both technologies compete on cost with natural gas, and because wind and sun are free, the utility will save hundreds of millions of dollars a year on fuel expenses.
The transition will come at a cost. The company says it will spend at least $25 billion over the next decade to replace aging gas and electric equipment and prepare the grid for more renewables, batteries and electric vehicles—major capital investments that would eventually boost returns for shareholders. The expenditures will likely result in rate increases for customers, though Consumers anticipates keeping them below the rate of inflation in the coming years.
Rare Derecho Pounds East
Yesterday’s Derecho event was similar to the one that kicks off this video from 2012 – one of my all-time favorites.
Mudslide Slam
No idea if this is climate related, but holy cow.
A powerful landslide of more than 2,000 feet in width has taken eight houses into the sea in northern Norway. The instability continued for several hours and one person was evacuated from a nearby property, but there have been no reports of injuries.
The landslide of more than 2,000 feet wide and 500 feet high occurred on the western side of Kråkneset in Alta municipality on Wednesday afternoon. The police were notified of the incident at 3.45pm and a rescue operation was immediately launched by air and sea.
A local managed to capture some of the event on camera. The video, featured in Altaposten, shows the sheer power of the land movement. One local described how he heard a bang in the loft of his cabin and assumed someone was in the building. “I ran for my life,” he said, once the situation became clear.
The video prompted one twitter wag to recall a memorable climate denial meme:
Never More Clear: Climate Denial’s Link to Racism
I’ve been saying this for a long time, finally folks catching up.
Climate denial is joined by bands of steel to racism. They always show up together. Always.
As good a time as any to discuss, I would say.
Start at about 4:00 in the video above, for example of Uber-denier “Lord” Christopher Monckton talking about President Obama’s supposedly fraudulent birth certificate – to obvious delight of a climate denial conference crowd.
Important point: Racism is not a bug in climate denial, it is an essential feature.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in the Washington Post:
Toni Morrison said it best, in a 1975 speech: “The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” As a marine biologist and policy nerd, building community around climate solutions is my life’s work. But I’m also a black person in the United States of America. I work on one existential crisis, but these days I can’t concentrate because of another.
The sheer magnitude of transforming our energy, transportation, buildings and food systems within a decade, while striving to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions shortly thereafter, is already overwhelming. And black Americans are disproportionately more likely than whites to be concerned about — and affected by — the climate crisis. But the many manifestations of structural racism, mass incarceration and state violence mean environmental issues are only a few lines on a long tally of threats. How can we expect black Americans to focus on climate when we are so at risk on our streets, in our communities, and even within our own homes? How can people of color effectively lead their communities on climate solutions when faced with pervasive and life-shortening racism?
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Here’s the rub: If we want to successfully address climate change, we need people of color. Not just because pursuing diversity is a good thing to do, and not even because diversity leads to better decision-making and more effective strategies, but because, black people are significantly more concerned about climate change than white people (57 percent vs. 49 percent), and Latinx people are even more concerned (70 percent). To put that in perspective, it means that more than 23 million black Americans already care deeply about the environment and could make a huge contribution to the massive amount of climate work that needs doing.
Ibram X. Kendi in the Atlantic:
Continue reading “Never More Clear: Climate Denial’s Link to Racism”The first volume of their Fourth National Climate Assessment, released last year, concluded that there is “no convincing alternative explanation” for global warming other than “human activities, especially emissions of greenhouses gases.” This year’s second volume, released into the mad dash of Black Friday sales and family reunions, stated, “More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”
“I don’t believe it,” President Donald Trump said in response. “No. No. I don’t believe it.”
I have heard this before. I can relate.
“No. No. I’m not racist,” Trump has said repeatedly. Evidence be damned.
I feel how climate scientists probably feel when they hear Trump and others disbelieve what their scientific community says is beyond disbelief. Scholars of racism watch as individuals dismiss our scientific consensus as casually as they form a consensus of disbelief. Climate and racial scientists watch as the denials of climate change and racism combine for the denial that “marginalized” communities of color “are expected to experience greater impacts,” as foretold in the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
The disbelievers do not believe that either climate change or racism is real. Or they do not believe they are caused by emissions of greenhouse gases or racist policies. Or they do not believe that regulating them would be better for society.
Tesla: The Next Generation
Hurricanes that Stall
First day of Hurricane season, and scientists are asking new questions about hurricane behavior.