By Julian Singer The need for electricity storage has produced a bewildering array of different companies using different techniques. There are many ways in which they can be classified, one of which is by their capacity to store electricity. Small cells, such as lithium-ion, can of course be duplicated but generally become uneconomical beyond a [...]
By Barney Smith It is well known that Lithium is a soft, silver-white, chemical element with the symbol Li and atomic number 3, which means that it is the least dense metal and solid element within the alkali metal group on the periodic table. In nature, lithium occurs only in compounds, due to its high [...]
By Julian Singer Donald Sadoway is a professor of chemistry at MIT. He has been known for his animated lecturing style for a number of years, but more recently he has given several entertaining talks promoting electricity storage using liquid metal batteries[1]. These talks focus not so much on the technology but on how to [...]
By Julian Singer In a talk on 16 November 2021 that was part of the Oxford Energy series Mike Mason showed how ammonia could become the key fuel of the future. His argument starts from the observation that enough solar energy reaches the earth’s surface to satisfy our needs but that too much of it [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yxn5qnmemg By Julian Singer Ambri, a Massachusetts-based company founded by researchers at MIT, has designed a battery that is a promising contender for storing electricity. It is a liquid metal battery, which initially consists of solid Calcium and Antimony electrodes separated by Calcium Chloride (a type of salt). These elements are all readily and cheaply [...]
By Julian Singer On 9 September Energy Vault, the Swiss energy storage company, announced a merger with Novus Capital Corporation II, a special purpose acquisition or “blank check” company that listed on the New York stock exchange in February. The combined company is valued at $1.1 billion. The combined company will start with $388m in [...]
By Julian Singer While most of the renewable world is focused on storing electricity, Norwegian company EnergyNest has concentrated on storing heat. It was founded in 2011 and received the first commercial revenue from its Thermal Battery in 2016. Since then it has been expanding its range of application. The principle is very simple: a [...]
By Julian Singer The news on batteries is dominated by Gigawatt manufacturing sites such as those proposed by Britishvolt in Northumberland and Northvolt in Sweden. AMTE Power, who made a successful entry into AIM in March, is going a different way, focussing on specialist markets with its Ultra range of batteries, each of which has [...]
By Barney Smith Last week the UK Government produced the long-awaited Hydrogen policy strategy which seeks to put some flesh on the bones of the “Ten-Point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution” launched by the Prime Minister in November 2020. Crucially, it recognises the importance of hydrogen within that overall plan. The strategy notes that [...]
By Julian Singer At the annual Oxford Energy Day in 2019, whose theme was storage, a bewilderingly long list of possible techniques was presented, many of which were still academic or at the stage of laboratory testing. Now we are seeing an increasing number of these ideas being implemented by small companies that are building [...]