259: Flow Battery Developments – Old Tech is Taking Off

 On today’s episode of Still To Be Determined, we’re talking about flow batteries and whether they can be a leader in the industry, even though they’re based on technology from the 19th century.

Hi everybody. Welcome to Still To Be Determined. I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some stuff for kids and I’m just generally curious about technology. Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

And Matthew, how are you today? I’m very good, Sean. How are you doing? I’m doing well. So before we get into the conversation about the flow batteries and the development of, as Matt pointed out, some of the largest battery installations in the world, at this point, it seems like number one, number two, and number three are all going to be flow batteries.

Does that sound right to you, Matt?

It’s, it’s looking like that. Yeah. Yeah.

So, but before we get into that discussion, we always like to loop back to our previous episodes and see what you all said in the comments. This is from episode 258 recycling renewables is the problem solved. There were comments like this from Ironman who wrote in to say related to renewables needs subsidies crowd.

There’s the EV. EVs are terrible because the batteries need cobalt that’s mined by child slaves in the Congo nonsense. Let’s be clear, Iron Man is not saying that the child mining in the Congo is nonsense. What he is saying is the argument that the cars are bad because of that cobalt. Yep. His point is, watch the reaction when you point out to them that cobalt is used in oil refining and ask them if we should stop the oil refining.

And cosmetics.

And cosmetics, this reminder from Ironman seems to fall into the discussion that we had last week, in which we talked about how older technologies start to take on the air of quote unquote normal, where new technologies get picked at in a way where people start to question them in ways.

Not that it’s unfair to question them, but they work from places of assumption that the normal is good. Therefore the new should be taken apart and they don’t stop and reassess like, well, what are we defending? We don’t like cobalt being mined by children, nor should we. The solution is not to stop the batteries.

The solution is to stop the cobalt mining with children. And instead people focus on the fact that the new tech has it, but don’t pay attention to that old tech also does.

So well, it’s also human nature cause we don’t like change, but also in that not liking change this new thing I don’t like. And so you cherry pick the things about it that are negatives and just hammer at it, but not having the curiosity to look beyond that and be like, Oh, my wife’s cosmetics have cobalt and the gasoline I’m pumping into my car had cobalt used to process it.

It’s like suddenly the argument just falls flat. But the argument never even looked, deigns to look in that direction. Yeah, it’s just. Find the points that we can hammer at something we don’t like. That’s basically what it comes down to, unfortunately.

The same issues on display in chatter on the wires comment where chatter on the wire goes onto a longer comment, but I just wanted to focus on the opening line, which is, I like the subsidies information.

I had no idea how much the oil and gas subsidies were. So I went and looked at it goes on from there to talk about the, the impacts of changes in the technology and what could happen as a result of moving from the argument being, this is bad because it’s a technology that is new. Chatter goes into a conversation or a discussion around the idea that the EV market and transition to electric vehicles is more specifically beneficial for people in large cities because of the lack of the same sort of intense distance travel that people in more rural communities have to deal with. I do not disagree with chatters pointing that out, but I would point out to loop back to the idea of change and infrastructure.

What you’re relying on with the oil and gas vehicle is an infrastructure that was decades in the making, and there hasn’t yet been that time to provide that kind of infrastructure development around the EV market, but that is something that they’re working on both distance. Distance traveled in EV’s, they’re trying to increase that as much as possible, but there is also the need.

And the industry understands this to develop charging stations and the ease and speed of charging to match ice vehicles. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Matt? Yeah. Well, I,

I hate bringing up China. Like, if you just look at what China’s doing just over the past month, they have shown off and they’ve actually flown a whole bunch of like, YouTubers who are EV, cover EV content out to China to see what BYD is doing.

And Geely’s doing all these kinds of things that they’re rolling out. And some of these companies have charging infrastructure in place in China today that can charge cars, 1, 000 kilowatts. It’s one megawatt shoved into a car. We have nothing even close to that. Like for us, DC fast charging is 350 kilowatts.

So there is, is China saying, China’s saying here, hold my beer. Here’s one in a, uh, parking garage at a mall that can do it in 1000 kilowatts. And for cars to do this, like a lot of cars historically for EVs have been like, I can’t remember if the, the voltage was 400 volts, but like the car I just got, I just got a Hyundai Ioniq and some of the newer EVs like that are coming out with 800 volt charging, and that allows them to get to the higher, uh, charging speeds better than cars that are on the lower voltage.

And so it’s like, they’re making cars they can charge incredibly fast. They have the charging infrastructure they’re rolling out. They can charge them incredibly fast. And as soon as you start doing that, The whole thing of like the worry about my car can’t, I can’t do a long road trip. It’s like, well, here’s a charger that will charge a car in five to eight minutes, which is probably the average length of time people spend at a gas station filling up, paying and getting going.

Yeah. So it’s like, we’re now in a, we’re in a realm now where EVs can, it’s no longer theory. Here it is. There are, they’re on the market, not here in the U S, but in China, there are cars that can charge virtually as fast as a gas car. It doesn’t matter if the battery then has a range of 300 miles or 500 miles or a thousand miles as this infrastructure rolls out, just like we have gas stations everywhere and we have EV chargers everywhere.

It’s like, it doesn’t matter at that point. And as an EV enthusiast, I’m biased. You can say that. It’s the better technology. It’s like, all you have to do is own one and drive one. And you realize, wow, this is so much better than a gas car. Like you’re monstrously better. Like the same thing for lawnmowers.

It’s like my electric lawnmower is so much better than a gas lawnmower. It’s not even funny. It’s not even a contest. You mean you don’t

miss walking behind a combustion engine that is spouting exhaust directly into your face? And it’s

super loud. You don’t like that. And that you have to change, and you have to change the oil sometimes a couple times a year.

It’s like, I don’t want to do that. And you don’t have to do that with an electric lawnmower or a car and all that kind of stuff. So there’s so many benefits that come with it. It’s just the better technology. But for some reason, like we talked about in the previous comment, it’s like there’s this fear of change.

And not seeing the need of like, what I have now is just fine. Why do we have to spend all this money upgrading infrastructure and doing all this stuff when I don’t want to do it? It’s like, look at the other side, the other side of this bump we’re on right now, it’s going to be so much better than what we have today.

It’s like, that’s, that’s why you want to do it. You can make the arguments about climate change if you want or not. It doesn’t matter. It’s, it’s a better technology. So it’s like, that’s why it’s happening. Uh, but I bring up China because like, they’re really. They’re far ahead of anybody else in the world for EVs being produced for charging infrastructure being rolled out. They’re kind of like what we should be looking at is like that’s what we should be doing here. That’s what we should be doing everywhere.

The issue of change was the main focus of the comments on this episode We’ll end it with this one from Darth Sirius. Thank you for dropping by, Darth. Darth says, You guys mentioned people’s unwillingness to upgrade older tech because it’s more expensive when they can just keep using the old stuff because it’s convenient.

That’s the exact reason why drill baby drill is so freaking stupid here in the United States. At least from an energy independence point of view, Ricky from 2 Bit Da Vinci has an excellent video that describes how the oil and gas drilling industry in the U. S. use newer drilling techniques like fracking that actually pulls out crude that is too, quote, sweet.

AKA not contaminated for our consumption because the refineries here in the U. S. are all still set up for the old, crappy, dirty garbage oil they used to pull out in the 1800s. He goes on to point out that as a result, the United States sells this overly sweet oil to other oil rich nations. Such as Saudi Arabia, where they have the newer tech to refine it and then sell it back to us.

That’s right. We are shipping, shipping oil overseas to refine it, to

bring

it back again. Dumb, the dumb, dumb in an industry that is subsidized

in an industry that is subsidized. This is. Going back a hundred years, this is what happened to countries that would cut down lumber, ship the lumber to other countries, and then buy furniture from those countries instead of having the ability to make furniture.

the furniture themselves. It’s a cycle that is effectively bleeding money out of your economy over time. So arguments to say our energy independence is born of our ability to get oil out of the ground is undermined when the only way to use that oil is to actually buy it after a different country processes it for us.

It’s remarkable. Which also, which also strengthens the argument of instead of spending money to upgrade our internal infrastructure to process it ourselves. That money would be better spent on newer technologies that are these renewable or green technologies that would give us the same level of energy independence, but it would give us that energy and pathway for a cleaner technology way into the future.

That is also cheaper long term. So it’s like, if you want to get that return on investment, it is far smarter to build out a renewable infrastructure than it is to get the updated oil technology, refining technology. It’s like, that’s insane. Lots

of facepalms right now. Yeah. On now to our discussion about Matt’s most recent, this is his episode.

Why isn’t this revolutionary battery everywhere? And Matt, you shared a lot of information about the tech that’s on display here. It’s a very old tech. That went through decades of just sitting in the background, because in theory, they knew what they could do, but technologically they couldn’t make it happen.

And then of course, various other texts rose to the level where those things were no longer theoretical and they could start doing them. And now they’re actually making these batteries. They are putting them into, into storage facilities, building up massive storage facilities in order to shore up energy storage.

The one that’s going to be built in Switzerland, you point out is going to be sitting at a border, which effectively puts it into like a outlet away from being a part of the European power grid. China is relying upon this for their massive power needs. It’s being, the testing is going into, is it able to provide enough power in a blackout scenario where everything goes down?

Can this battery continue the power grid to be able to keep service from being interrupted in massive ways in that kind of calamity. So your video covered a lot of terrain. And I couldn’t help but wonder what was the one thing about all of this that you were just like, that’s the best piece. That’s it.

This is the, this is the thing I think is the coolest or the, the most impressive or the thing I wish they could hold on to and use it in other places as well. What’s the one thing that stood out to you from your research that you were just like, I can’t, I can’t let

go of that nugget. It’s going to be very simple, but it really comes back to how long these batteries can last longevity.

Like how much hammering they can take for a grid scale storage system for 20 plus years easily. Like for me, that’s the thing that’s just like, damn, it’s like we need something that’s can scale well, which is what this does, but that can also take a beating as far as. How much energy can not only store, but like how long it can do that.

And how long can it do its job? Because you’re going to spend huge amounts of money building these things out. You want them to last as long as you possibly can. So for me, that’s part of the reason why I find flow batteries fascinating. Long lifespan, easy to recycle, the investment that you put into it for the infrastructure and building it out. That that plant can be there for decades and decades and decades. Super easy to take the liquid this stuff is 30 years old needs to be recycled, just fill in some new stuff and it’s gonna keep going for another couple decades. Like that to me

insanely cool.

I was impressed by The fact that you can have this reaction take place with the same chemical.

Yes. That’s the cool thing about how it can

in a battery, like you’re used to like, well, it’s, it’s this metal and this metal, it’s this and this, this acid versus this. And this is where your reaction comes in.

And here it is. You’ve got the two components are the same thing. And if I understood it correctly, it effectively gives you the opportunity to just basically swap them back and forth. To say, like you end up with the charge occurs regardless, as long as you’ve got the positively charged version over here and the negatively charged version over here, that release of the energy is going to take place.

And that’s just kind of like,

like it’s cool science. It’s just like, it’s like really cool science. And it’s one of the reasons why vanadium is very expensive. That’s the big knock people plug about vanadium is very expensive, but it’s like, it is so effective. And it’s going to last for so long and it’s so easy to recycle it into new batteries.

It’s like, yeah, it’s expensive, but once you get going with it, it’s like, it’s just going to kind of keep going. It’s like, that’s part of why I like the longevity aspect of it and the recycling aspect of it. So yeah, you pay a little more money for this, but it’s going to last you two to three times longer than putting in a lithium battery facility.

Yeah. That’s. That’s very cool. That falls into line with this comment from John M. Cho. This was a, I’m always like, there’s, I watch a lot of YouTube and I read a lot of the comments and typically it’s like, you know, here’s this thing, science, science, science. And then somebody shows up and it’s like, that’s cool.

Or somebody shows up and says, that’s dumb. I don’t like that. The comments go back and forth and then I watch your videos and I go into the comments and it’s scientists showing up and saying like, I science all the time. Let me tell you about my science. Like this one from John who says I actually worked with Sumitomo on expanding the market for these batteries back in 2019.

Part of the problem was meeting the market at the time. Vanadium isn’t mined specifically, it is part of the tailings of other mining processes. And the renewable infrastructure wasn’t as big as it is now. So there was a limit to the number of use cases. We investigated pilot use cases with rural areas and other off grid applications, but then the funding was cut off during the pandemic.

I’m still very optimistic about the tech. It scales incredibly well with large renewables. Thank you for your comment, John. And again, with the people who are going to science, SolveFixBuild jumps into the comments to say, I’ve tested a number of these products, and I am an energy storage project developer.

Here are the benefits of VR batteries. You can refresh the electrolyte effectively mitigating degradation in energy capacity. Electrolyte is not flammable. Tech is relatively established and has been in use for at least 20 years commercially for stationary storage. And then he goes on to point out some disadvantages.

So the people who know about these things, yeah. Seem to very clearly land on like. Yeah, this is here. It’s a thing. This is One of the things that we’ve had pop up in a lot of your recent videos are the people who say We’re never gonna see it. Wake me when it gets here. This

is

here,

right? Which is this is one of the videos I was talking about like when we had those conversations about people’s reactions of like wake me up when it’s here, and it’s like you should revisit these topics. In the back of my mind as we were talking about that, it’s like, just wait, got a video coming up, or we’re revisiting flow batteries, guess what, they’re here, it’s not something that you can go and buy it off the store shelf, but it is being used, it is being rolled out, it is having a bigger and bigger impact around the world. And in the research of this, we didn’t really dive into it, I mentioned it at the very beginning of the video, but there’s even residential versions of this coming to market, and for me personally, I’m super excited about those, because. Imagine having like a refrigerator sized device that’s a 40 kilowatt hour battery, which is twice the size of the stuff I have in my garage.

I could just plop this refrigerator off the back of my house and 40 kilowatt hours of a battery that’s going to last 20 to 30 years. I will most likely be, you know, in a retirement home, Sean, that thing would need to be replaced.

The refrigerator might not last that long. I took this to mean like when you’ve got 60 percent efficiency being viewed as like, this is an improvement.

Just think about how much better these can get with time and more research. Or where other batteries can step in ahead by beating that number, it’s only going to get better. It’s not like we’re at 95 percent and they’re not going to get better. This is 60%. There’s plenty of room for improvement.

There’s also a, I’ve said this before, efficiency is a little bit of a red herring, a little bit, not completely, but it’s something that people don’t understand about our grid infrastructure.

Like when they see like, Oh, this battery is only 60%, it needs to be like a hundred or 90 percent for it to be worthwhile. When you’re talking about utility scale stuff, that’s not the case at all because there is so much waste in our energy infrastructure. So like you have a nuclear power plant or a gas plant, you have all these things that are producing energy.

There’s a lot of energy that goes to waste, like it’s just wasted. It’s not even, it’s not used. It’s just basically imagine it being kind of burned off. It’s just kind of goes away as we transition to these newer technologies, solar and wind with batteries. There’s a conceivable place that we can get to where it’s like if, if let’s say if our entire infrastructure used.

A terawatt of power and we needed X number of terawatts. It doesn’t mean we would have to replace every single one of those terawatts with solar and wind. You just have to replace the used terawatts. Correct. We just have to find out how to get to the stuff we actually use and need. which is actually smaller than what we currently produce.

And it’s because of all the waste in our current infrastructure. Right. And with things like batteries and energy storage, it unlocks the ability to do that. So it’s like, whether we stayed on fossil fuels or not, energy storage is kind of key to getting a more efficient grid. And so it’s like, the more I learn about this, the more I’m just like, my mind is just kind of like repeatedly blowing of like, we don’t have to replace every single kilowatt hour or kilowatt that we generate.

We don’t. We just have to be smarter about how we do it. And so even though it’s 60%, this could have a huge impact on how much money the utility has to spend to make the energy that we actually use in our homes, in our industries. So it’s, it’s, it’s, that’s why I kind of say that the efficiency sometimes is a little bit of a red herring because.

You have to think about it in a very different way. Right. Um, of course it’d be awesome if it was 90%. Right. That’d be better, but it’s like, we, we don’t have to get there right now. We just have to do better than what we’re currently doing and just baby step our way there. Right.

Last two comments I wanted to share were in a vein of just kind of patting Matt on the back. I wanted him to know that people out there are rooting for him. Like this one from line stepper, who says so impressive that you actually show the primary sources in your videos and not just links in the description. Love the videos. I know that Matt takes it very seriously when he’s putting these together, that he’s actually showing his work.

Matt is not one to say like, yada, yada, yada batteries are great. He wants you to actually be able to follow his chain of, of thought. And I also appreciate that as somebody who has to then be able to talk to him about it. Finally, this one from Teeho plays really stood out to me. And there were many, many comments like this in the comments.

Tio points out who would have guessed 50 years ago that batteries would be some of the most exciting tech of the future. Tio, I couldn’t disagree. I couldn’t agree more. I remember as a, as a little kid, it was always lasers. Robots. Thinking computers. Yes. They, those are the big three, like spaceships, wormholes, hyperspeed, time travel.

At no point was I, as a kid pulling up a Duracell copper top and being like, and now the battery shows up and everybody’s like, thank God the battery’s here. Hurray!

Although I will point out, there is a classic scene in Empire Strikes Back where, when they get to Dagobah, what does R2 want to do? He wants to recharge and Luke connects him to a battery.

So folks, Sean, yes. Yeah. This is going to be a little joke for Sean and a joke a little for me to show your work comment ties back to, you’ll remember this, Mrs. Lafika, math class in high school. Yes. Yeah. We both have the same math teacher. Uh, I, there was an exam I took. And I was horrible at memorizing the formulas and on the math test though, I was very good at problem solving. So I would look at the question and I’d scrap a lot like, okay, I think this is how you could do it.

And I would get the right answer. Right. So I, if you looked at my test, I’d have the right answer on most of the questions, but I wouldn’t show my work. And she’d always give me a D, C, show on every test, show your work, show your work. So it’s like that was drilled into my head in a high school math class.

And I’ve taken that. All the way through my life says like, show your work. That’s that’s why I

do that. So thank you Mrs Lafika. Yes. Listeners jump into the comments. What do you think about all of this? Did you see anything in Matt’s video that we didn’t talk about here? Is there something in our discussion here that you think was interesting and you want to jump onto, let us know in the comments and of course, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends.

Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you want to support us directly, you can go to still tbd. fm, or you can click the join button on YouTube. Both of those ways lighted, throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about Mrs Lafika.

Thank you so much, everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We’ll talk to you next time.