Whatever technology or strategy announcements come from Tesla’s Battery Day, speculation that the company will reduce purchases of battery cells from partners as a consequence is incorrect, CEO Elon Musk has said.

With Battery Day postponed from Q1 of this year, the company will be hosting its latest ‘big reveal’ later today. Industry and media commentators have posited their own predictions on what will be shown off by Tesla.

These guesses have included an electric vehicle (EV) battery pack with a million miles of range on a full charge to improved ways to control and manage batteries and let them play into electricity markets using the company’s proprietary energy trading software-driven platform, AutoBidder.

Others have stated that Tesla’s purchase in 2019 of supercapacitor maker Maxwell Technologies could be key, with Maxwell also behind a proprietary ‘dry cell’ process for making batteries without the need for the expensive and tricky drying step, which could improve battery production quality and aid even higher volume manufacturing.

What Musk appeared to allude to was speculation that Tesla will take to higher levels vertical integration for battery manufacturing i.e. making battery cells as well as packs and other equipment itself. Media outlets and analysts have posited that this could mean that terms of partnerships with major suppliers – some of which have only recently been fully signed off on – might change radically and suddenly.

Oh the irony, it burns! Texas powered the US into position as a global oil and gas powerhouse, but now the Lone Star State is leading in wind power and its solar sector is coming on strong. If all goes according to plans laid out by the startup EnergyX, Texas will also lay claim to birthing disruptive solid state energy storage technology that shepherds more renewables onto the grid while making electric vehicles go farther, charge faster, and cost less. In an interesting coincidence, the EnergyX news coincides with news that the departments of Energy, Commerce, Defense, and State have all joined forces in support of the domestic lithium battery industry. Interesting!

A Texas-Sized Disruptive Energy Storage Plan Takes Shape
EnergyX has been sailing under the CleanTechnica radar, but the Texas angle involves someone who is a familiar face around here. That would be Dr. John Goodenough, widely credited with inventing the lithium-ion battery 40 years ago. At age 98, the Nobel Prize winner is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Cockrell School of Engineering, where his research includes pesky Li-ion battery problems.

One area involves dendrites, the feathery growths that occur over time in conventional Li-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes. They can also form in other energy storage chemistries. Dendrites can interfere with the efficiency of the battery and shorten its lifespan. Solving that problem once and for all could expand the field of next-generation batteries into new materials that are cheap, abundant, and non-toxic.

Though much progress has been made in preventing dendrite formation in liquid electrolytes, researchers have been zeroing in on solid-state electrolytes as a more effective and holistic approach that also cuts costs and boosts efficiency.

Last spring CleanTechnica took a look at the burgeoning interest in solid-state batteries, and noted that “a dramatic improvement in energy density combined with a drop in costs is the energy storage unicorn sought by researchers in the solid state lithium-metal field.”

In 2015, Eric Clifton envisioned a home energy storage appliance that simply plugged into the wall. He founded Orison Inc and in 2016, launched a Kickstarter campaign to let customers lock in an order for the 2.2 kWh wall-mounted appliance.

Fast forward a few years, and Orison has perfected the design of the product. The company has secured a contract with Octillion Power Systems to supply batteries for the devices and the self-installable home battery he envisioned is now on the cusp of becoming a reality. “This is an ideal energy-storage solution for homeowners or small businesses, because the system is simple to install, lightweight and scalable to optimize your energy and to ensure power is where you need it during an outage,” said Eric Clifton, founder and CEO of Orison.

To make the systems capable of being a plug and play device, installable by homeowners, Orison broke the unit down into smaller subassemblies. The batteries supplied by Octillion, for example, are cut into 1.1 kWh modules weighing in at 22 pounds. The result is a modular home energy storage system that not only makes installation a breeze, it makes building a system sized exactly to the needs of the home practical. These 1.1 kWh battery modules were the result of a joint effort between Orison and Octillion. They had to develop a custom battery pack that not only met their performance needs, but fit in their slim form factor.

“Octillion was our vendor of choice because of their ability to provide customizable solutions based on our needs, while still being able to scale to meet our mass-production throughput and pricing requirements,” Clifton said. “This unique battery design, while challenging to develop and certify, is compact enough that it allows for home or business owners to do their own installations, a first for the industry.”

The intelligent energy storage system harvests and stores excess generation from an on site renewable resource for later use. Stored power can be used to stretch daytime solar generation to cover the home’s evening energy consumption or serve as a backup power source for critical loads in the event of a grid failure. The slick 2.2 kWh Orison Panel comes with a starting price tag of $2,200 and boasts a maximum power output of 1.8 kW.

Researchers have developed a battery for storing energy for the electrical grid that they think could beat lithium-ion batteries in cost by a large margin (Matter 2020, DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2020.08.022). The new system costs $16 per kilowatt-hour of energy stored, which is one-eighth the rate for standard lithium-ion batteries. “This is a completely new battery chemistry with promising performance and cost,” says Yi Cui, a materials scientist and engineer at Stanford University.

Storing the intermittent energy produced by solar and wind farms is becoming ever more important as the share of renewable energy grows across the globe. But cost is the biggest hurdle in finding the right battery for the grid. An affordable grid battery should cost $100/kWh, according to the US Department of Energy. Lithium-ion batteries, which lead the charge for grid storage, cost $175/kWh.

To develop a less costly option, Cui, Hui Wu of Tsinghua University, and Yang Jin of Zhengzhou University decided to tweak another battery considered promising for grid storage: the Zebra battery. This is a type of molten-salt battery that uses molten sodium as the anode, and a cathode made of nickel along with a molten sodium chloride salt. Nickel is expensive, so this battery technology has been used only for a few small grid installations.

In their new battery, the researchers chose molten lithium as the anode, and replaced nickel with low-cost zinc and combined it with a lithium chloride salt to make the cathode. Past attempts to use zinc at the cathode have brought challenges. When those batteries discharge, zinc chloride turns into metallic zinc, Cui explains, and the metal forms zinc particles that grow uncontrollably, making the electrode unstable.

So instead of using pure zinc, the researchers used particles of brass, a copper-zinc alloy. The brass releases zinc during battery charging, and when the metallic zinc forms during discharge, it alloys with the copper and stabilizes.

The new battery chemistry works at a lower temperature than traditional Zebra batteries, Wu says. Keeping those batteries’ sodium melted requires temperatures of 350 °C, while the new chemistry works at 215 °C, which means researchers can use less-expensive materials to seal and package the battery. The battery cell that the researchers made has a theoretical energy density of 700 Wh/kg. Cui expects the energy density to drop when they scale up the battery in size, but he says, “If we can even get half of that energy density, it would still be as good as lithium-ion or maybe even slightly better.”

Energy storage is one of the foremost enablers of the energy transition – many would argue it is the primary enabler.

It allows stakeholders in the energy markets – from corporations to consumers – to take a level of ownership of their energy consumption.

And there is consensus that there is still vast untapped potential for the many variations of storage, including thermal, chemical, mechanical and electrical.

But where in the energy value chain will we see storage being most deployed?

In generation/hybrid settings? As grid support? In the commercial and industrial sectors? In the home? Or as part of eMobility infrastructure?

Go on: Take a minute to think of your answer.

I posed the above question this week to the several hundred people who joined a webinar hosted by PEi and Enlit Europe on Innovation in Energy Storage. The results were fascinating and provoked a great in-depth discussion with my panellists, who were from EASE (European Association for Storage of Energy), Aggreko, Enel Foundation, and IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency).

What were those results? Well, I’m going to recommend you download our on-demand recording to find out: you won’t be disappointed by the depth of discussion that the panellists provided.

They highlighted the storage success stories worldwide, where the new frontiers of opportunities will be, and also flagged the challenges that remain, including, as one panellist put it, “the missing money gap”.

And once you’ve tuned-in to the recording, why not share your views with your peers on PEi’s LinkedIn community.

HAYWARD, Calif., Sept. 16, 2020 – Octillion Power Systems, a leading provider of advanced lithium-ion storage systems, worked with Orison Inc, an energy storage company based in Wyoming, to offer the first-of-its-kind self-installation home-battery system.

The new energy storage system allows the home owner to harvest energy from renewables or from the grid and to be stored for later use as needed during an unexpected power interruption. It is smaller-scale and modular so that consumers can install the system themselves, and is affordable and accessible to serve all homes.

Octillion Power Systems of Hayward, California worked with Orison to develop a compact, customized battery pack that allows for the storage system to be ultra slim for ease of handling and installation. Octillion supplied 1.1kWh batteries for the new system, each of which uses two batteries. A single battery is 2.5 inches thick and weighs only 22 pounds.

“This is an ideal energy-storage solution for homeowners or small businesses, because the system is simple to install, lightweight and scalable to optimize your energy and to ensure power is where you need it during an outage,” said Eric Clifton, founder and CEO of Orison. “We’d like to thank Octillion for their work in helping us to design this first-of-its-kind battery.

“Octillion was our vendor of choice because of their ability to provide customizable solutions based on our needs, while still being able to scale to meet our mass-production throughput and pricing requirements,” Clifton said. “This unique battery design, while challenging to develop and certify, is compact enough that it allows for home or business owners to do their own installations, a first for the industry.”

Selling a $15,000 to $40,000 storage system add-on isn’t easy, but with the right approach you can build it into your solar sale and satisfy your homeowner at the same time. Homeowners tend to shy away from the addition of storage due to price, but they also miss the true value of what storage can do for their existing or soon-to-be purchased solar system and their long-term billing cycle. Though the need for energy storage can change geographically, the basic sales approach can work anywhere in the United States.

Selling a $15,000 to $40,000 storage system add-on isn’t easy, but with the right approach you can build it into your solar sale and satisfy your homeowner at the same time. Homeowners tend to shy away from the addition of storage due to price, but they also miss the true value of what storage can do for their existing or soon-to-be purchased solar system and their long-term billing cycle. Though the need for energy storage can change geographically, the basic sales approach can work anywhere in the United States.

There are three key drivers of the value proposition to walk a homeowner through that supports and drives the decision to purchase storage: the economics, the security and the technology.

1. The Economics

The economics of storage-only does not always have a payback profile. That said, the economics of a solar + storage system does have a positive payback almost everywhere in the United States. Most homeowners would pay for a solution that gave peace of mind during blackouts, natural disasters or severe weather; so the ability to have an investment pay itself off is a great selling point for something that also offers security and resiliency while not always necessary for the rest of the solar system to work. A history of U.S. generator sales demonstrates payback is not always the most critical factor. There is little economic return to a prestigious automobile, swimming pool or even a fancy roof, but these are decisions that homeowners feel strongly about every day. That said, there is a payback with solar + storage.

2. The Security

Homeowners treasure having a safe space, independence and something that is theirs. Rolling blackouts, fires and utility rate increases put their security at risk. If a homeowner has medical needs, is aging or has young children, then consistent power can be very important. Buying energy storage is an opportunity to support the safety and resilience of homeowners. It is a reality that without the electrical utility, a home cannot fully function. Moreover, with families working from home more regularly now in the age of COVID-19, there is an economic argument to protect employment by assuring a family has consistent power to do their jobs. Storage offers independence, security, certainty and safety for the whole family.

3. The Technology

Buying a battery today is not the same as buying a battery 20 years ago. These relatively small units can power a homeowner’s critical needs with ease and safety. They have sophisticated capabilities that allow homeowners to be their own power supply and not depend on the utility. Solar without storage puts power back onto the electrical grid, but most solar does not give a homeowner access to their own solar production in a critical situation when they need it most. Storage changes that with a simple app-based interface that allows a homeowner to choose how and when to use their power – a choice solar does not routinely present.