A behemoth lithium-battery recycling plant in Ohio and a mega-scale iron-air battery storage project in Maine are supercharging the United States effort to go electric.
Both projects are meant to boost energy sustainability and resilience in the U.S.—one by salvaging critical materials to lower dependence on imports and mining, the other by improving long-term energy storage, which is key to adding renewable energy sources to the grid.
In Lancaster, Ohio, Cirba Solutions has completed the first stage of a huge expansion project at its battery recycling plant, with materials recovery already under way, reports Canary Media. When the full expansion is complete by 2026, the US$400 million project—which received US$82 million in federal grants—is slated to produce an annual 15,000 tonnes of “black mass” from used batteries. This powdery substance is rich enough in critical mineral salts to power nearly 250,000 new electric vehicle batteries, or around one-quarter of current demand, says Cirba.
Meanwhile, New England’s notoriously vulnerable power grid will gain a measure of resilience, thanks to $147 million in federal funding for a huge iron-air battery project, Canary writes in a separate report. “The project would be able to inject 85 megawatts of power onto the grid, and maintain that level of discharge for up to 100 hours.”
Developed by Massachusetts-based Form Energy, the iron-air battery plant—which uses the low-cost and low-risk chemistry of “reversible rusting” to generate electricity—will be built at the site of an old paper mill in Lincoln, Maine.
Form Energy says iron-air batteries deliver storage at just 10% of the cost of lithium-ion batteries on a watt-hour-by-watt-hour basis, iron being the “fourth most widely available element in the world.” And iron-air batteries won’t “catch on fire or blow up in the way that lithium-ion batteries occasionally do,” the news story states.
The 8,500 megawatt-hours of promised storage capacity—greater than any battery plant running in the world today—will help redress New England’s grid woes: with little in the way of domestic gas sources, the region is dependent on foreign imports to keep the lights on, which becomes problematic in winter “because home heating gets first dibs on the fuel.”
In times of high demand, power plants sometimes have to switch to burning oil, Canary Media explains. “The region’s independent system operator, which runs the grid, has modeled likely scenarios in which the grid could run out of power for extended periods of time, and there are a lot of ways that could happen.”
The 100-hour storage capacity is much higher than the typical four to five hours that lithium-ion batteries provide.
Form Energy’s iron-air battery system looms large in the nascent sector of non-lithium long-duration energy storage (LDES). The only apparent drawback is its weight. But Form is sanguine about this issue, noting “this is really no disadvantage at all if they are employed in utility-scale storage systems.”
As renewable energy rapidly replaces fossil fuels on the grid, the U.S. is recognizing the pressing need for longer-term storage beyond what lithium-ion batteries can offer. To meet that challenge, the U.S. Department of Energy recently announced US$100 million to fund LDES pilot demonstrations with capacities exceeding 10 hours, reports Microgrid Knowledge. Research into how well LDES systems integrate with microgrids is also picking up steam.
