vanadium: the metal that may soon be powering your neighbourhood - lithium iron battery

Hawaii has a problem that the world may face in the next 10 years.
The solution could be a metal you might have never heard --vanadium.
Hawaii's problem is too much sun.
Or rather, too much solar energy goes into the grid.
Electricity generation has been painful in remote American states.
Without its own reserves of fossil fuel, it has to transport oil and coal in half.
Across the Pacific Ocean.
This makes Hawaii's electricity very, very expensive.
More than three times the American average.
That's why 10% residents of the island decided to install solar panels on the roof.
The problem is all the new sun.
Electricity comes at the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Hawaii's power monopoly Heco is concerned that parts of the grid may be overwhelmed by oversupply.
So last year, it started refusing to connect to the new-
Resident groups were purchased in some areas.
Not just Hawaii.
"There is a big problem in California," said Bill Radvak, Canada head of America's only vanadium mining company, the American Vanadium mining company.
"The energy of the coming sun --
Stream is really excellent, but it hit the system between noon and four o'clock P. M.
"This does not coincide with the peak demand for electricity, the peak demand for electricity is usually later in the afternoon and at night, when everyone comes home, turn on the lights, heating or air conditioning, burn the kettle, dinner in the microwave.
What the Golden State needs is to store a few hours of energy every afternoon until it is needed.
Radvak thinks he has a solution.
An electrolytic solution utilizing the special properties of vanadium.
Back in 2006, when Radvak's company decided to reopen an old vanadium mine in Nevada, the grid was the last thing they wanted to see.
At that time, it was all about steel.
This is because only 0 needs to be added.
The 15% vanadium creates a very solid steel alloy.
"Steel mills like it," Radvak said . ".
"They took a stick of vanadium and threw it into the mixture.
At the end of the day, they can maintain the same strength as the metal, but the material used is 30% less.
"It also makes steel tools more flexible.
If you are a little familiar with the name vanadium, it may be because you see its relief on the side of the wrench.
Since vanadium steel maintains hardness at high temperatures, it is used for drill bits, round saws, engine turbines and other moving parts that generate a lot of heat.
Therefore, the demand for steel may account for 90% of the demand for metal.
For more than a century, the alloy properties of vanadium have been well known.
Henry Ford used it in 1908 to make his T-body stronger and lighter.
For the same reason
And its heat resistance.
It was used in World War I to make portable artillery and armor.
But the history of vanadium seems to go further.
In fact, as early as 3rd century BC, human beings may have unknowingly mined this metal.
This is when the production of Damascus steel began.
It is said that the sword made of steel is very sharp, and if it is dropped on the blade, the hair will crack.
A steel machete in Damascus has enabled Muslim fighters to fight off the Crusades.
Samples taken from some antiques were found to contain a small amount of impurities, including-crucially -vanadium.
The strange thing is, these twomillennium-old steel-
Let tradition disappear in the middle18th Century. The vanadium-
The rich iron ore that forms steel in southern India must have ended up running out, this theory says.
Nowadays, vanadium is mainly used for structural steel, such as bridges and "Steel Bars" used to reinforce concrete ".
The market is small and sometimes unstable.
The supply is dominated by China, Russia and South Africa, where metals are mainly extracted as useful by-products
Products of iron ore slag and other mining processes. China -
This is the longest and biggest architectural boom in history.
Demand also dominates.
Beijing recently decided to stop using low
Quality rebar will increase the expected demand for vanadium by 40%.
However, the biggest source of future demand may not be related to steel, but may take advantage of the unusual electro-chemical properties of vanadium.
"In fact, vanadium was discovered twice, and one of the discoverers was the Swedish chemist Niles sefstrom, named after the Norwegian goddess of beauty, wandadis, "Professor Andrea Sella of University College London, Italian chemist.
To explain the reason, Sella produced a bottle of yellow that was easily misrecognized --Liquid of color.
He said it was a solution that "Oxidized" vanadium in sulfuric acid --
That is to say, vanadium stripped from its outermost five electrons (
It's in the fifth column of the periodic table).
Then he added a shiny piece of zinc.
The alloys and start shaking the mixture violently.
"Zinc will allow us to put the electrons back on vanadium --
We call it the chemical process of "reduction," he explains.
The solution quickly turns green and then gradually turns blue.
"If we keep shaking for a few minutes, we end up turning purple.
"Every change in color represents an electron being passed on to vanadium.
"You can easily hand over the electrons to vanadium and take them away --
This is the basis of a very, very stable battery.
The "Vanadium" redox flow "battery is indeed stable.
They can be discharged and charged 20,000 times without losing too much performance and are considered to last for decades (
They haven't had enough time to prove it yet).
They can also be huge.
Thanks in large part to their vanadium content. expensive.
The smallest "Cellcube" battery produced by American Vanadium in partnership with German engineering company Gildemeister covers an area equivalent to a parking lot for $100,000.
A giant tank consisting of two different vanadium solutions dissolved in sulfuric acid, separated by a film from the BBC London headquarters-
Home of 7,000 employees
Need a size of 12-2
The meter trailer was parked on the roof or buried underground, Radvak said.
His company provides the key ingredient of the battery-electrolyte (
Fluid in battery).
It is the same as the chemical solution in the Sella demo, and-
Convenient enough-
And the ending-
A product of a standard process for extracting vanadium from ore with sulfuric acid.
Radvak said that his target customers include large enterprise electricity customers, such as the Metropolitan Transportation Administration, which runs the New York Metro, and his company has just signed a pilot agreement with him to supply Cellcube batteries.
These companies are using higher and higher electricity bills during peak hours of the day, and Canada claims that if they use batteries at night, which is the cheapest time, they run out of the electricity they need during the day, they can cut their bills for a quarter.
By calming down demand between peak and trough per day, the battery also helps power companies.
One of their biggest expenses is the capacity of the power station outside the investment, only a few hours of weather per year, holidays and a day are the biggest peaks in power demand.
As more and more solar and wind energy is added to the grid, the challenge of balancing power supply and demand will become more difficult.
We're back in Hawaii.
Rooftop solar panels not only generate electricity at the "wrong" time of the day, but also at low voltage, according to Alexander Voyt, a German renewable energy entrepreneur, that means it's actually stuck at the local community level.
"Our traditional grid is built in a way that energy flows from high to low, not the opposite," he said . ".
This means that solar energy can only be shared among a handful of households --
Usually just near a village or town-
This happens to share inserting them into high-
National Grid voltage
Voit helped set up the vanadium battery company, which was later acquired by Gildermeister.
He expects that the batteries built next to the transformer can store the daily solar surplus in each community and then be released again in the evening.
This is an optimistic image, but it does raise two obvious problems.
First of all, why choose vanadium battery technology?
For example, after manufacturers have significantly increased their capacity to meet the yet-to-come hybrid and electric car boom, cheap lithium batteries are oversupply these days.
Lithium batteries can provide a lot of power very quickly, which is great if you need to balance unexpected fluctuations that pop up --
This may be caused by the sun passing through clouds or wind through strong winds.
However, the number of charges of lithium batteries can not even reach a tenth of the vanadium battery --
1,000 or 2,000 is likely to die after recharging.
Lithium batteries also do not reach the size needed to store the energy of the entire community for several hours.
In contrast, the vanadium battery can store more energy by adding a larger electrolyte tank.
They can then release it at a steady rate as needed, unlike conventional batteries, where larger storage often means greater power.
At the other end of the scale, there are also a large number of large-
Large-scale energy storage systems under development, such as energy storage systems using liquefied air and 1,000-
Fold the contraction of the air volume when the air cools-200C.
But Voyt says these systems take up a lot of space and are more suitable for the largest
Large scale facilities required, for example, a large offshore wind farm with high access
National Grid voltage
The second real big question for vanadium is whether there is enough material in the world.
The current challenge is that as China's demand for vanadium steel increases, the birth of the vanadium battery business is coming.
But there's a longer one. term problem -
The amount of vanadium added in steel alloys is so small that it is not economical to recover vanadium from steel at the end of its life.
Therefore, for the battery market, vanadium is actually lost forever.
But Voyt remains optimistic.
"Just like all the raw materials, how stable the demand in the market is, and how much incentive the industry has to build new mines, it's always a problem.
"As demand is on the rise, there are more than one American who are trying to fill the gap.
For example, a competitor's battery
Manufacturer Imergy developed a cheap method for producing vanadium electrolyte from fine ash produced from iron ore slag and coalburning.
In the long run, the demand for vanadium steel can be met by melting and re-casting old vanadium steel, rather than re-manufacturing, so that newly mined vanadium can be introduced into the energy market.
In the long run, maybe we will harvest vanadium from the sea
There are many such animals in the Pacific Ocean.
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