ou often hear about new and better battery technologies that are coming on to the market and we often get asked should people wait for these better technologies.
We advise against this for several reasons;
- we need to act now to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, not tomorrow or when a better technology becomes available,
- any new battery technology takes 5 to 10 years to becoming proven and commercially viable,
- many great battery technologies have failed when they have been used in real life applications,
- there is no guarantee that current technologies will get cheaper, in fact due to resource limitations and new government regulations regarding safety and recyclability, it is highly likely current technologies will increase in cost substantially,
- although early adopters tend to pay a premium price for their equipment the amounts, they save in energy costs often make up for more than any reduced costs in equipment.
There are new technologies coming out all the time and in the next few years some of them are likely to become available for commercial use. However, these are unlikely to be lithium-based batteries. More and more issues are becoming widely known about the difficulties being experienced with lithium-ion batteries, from fires, to lack of recyclability, to less available resources which is resulting in resources being more expensive, to issues with insuring battery installations.
Governments, in Australia and worldwide are becoming aware of these issues and new regulations are being developed to address the issues, particularly around fire safety and whole of life responsibility including recycling. This is resulting in batteries and battery installations becoming more expensive rather than cheaper.
In the past a number of batteries have been released on the market only to fail when being used in daily operation. Batteries are generally tested in factories at 25oC. Although they may operate without issues at this temperature when exposed to temperatures moving away from this temperature, in particular over 35oC, or below 5oC, there are often operating issues. This may include degradation of the batteries or slow charging and discharging. This often means batteries need to be air condition or batteries needing to be put on heating mats.
One well known battery failure was the Aquion salt water battery financed by Bill Gates. Initially the battery was heralded as being environmentally friendly and recyclable, non-flammable with no toxic materials. However, in real life applications it was found to have very slow charging and usage rates and didn’t operate well outside the limited temperature range. Many installers were left with containers full of these batteries they were unable to sell and many consumers needed to replace their batteries with more reliable equipment.
This issue with battery failure was particularly noticeable with the ITP battery testing project which took a number of batteries and tested them by charging and discharging them in various temperatures. This was done in 3 rounds staring from Oct 2015 and finishing in February 2022. All except 1 battery from round 1 and 2 batteries from round 2 failed. Round 3 did not operate for long enough to get a clear indication of battery longevity, however several of the batteries had already exhibited problems. Apart from the higher-than-expected failure rate of batteries the biggest take away was the amount of degradation of the lithium-ion batteries in particular.
Although not as widely known in the Australian battery market the SoNick battery is actually one of the earliest battery technologies to become proven and commercially viable. There are actually a large number of SoNick battery installations around the world ranging from off grid remote installations to household installations to MWh containerised installations.