Unlocking Renewables | Donald Sadoway

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• published: 21 Oct 2015
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“There's no greater gift than sustainable reliable electricity. It really unlocks the future,” says professor Donald Sadoway in this video for the World Economic Forum. The electrochemist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), gives a progress report on his team’s pioneering work on large-scale liquid metal batteries - a radical innovation that will enable renewable energy to be stored, so that wind and solar can compete with traditional sources of power. Be illuminated by watching the full talk above, or read extracts below. On lighting up the world “Everything that we associate with the 21st century world is predicated on the availability of electricity. If you look at this image, where you see light you see the modern world, where you don't see light is one of two situations: either nobody lives there, or the place hasn't been electrified.” “Electricity is very unusual, because the electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. The way the grid operates is that supply has to be balanced with demand everywhere at all times. So you're looking at the world's largest supply chain with zero inventory.” “Imagine if every time you wanted to draw water, the water had to come immediately from a spring because there's no such thing as water storage. And then when you turn off the faucet you have to cut back the supply for a spring, otherwise the water will continue to flow, build up pressure and damage the pipes. The same thing happens on the grid if supply exceeds demand. Voltage will rise, frequency will shift - both with devastating consequences. Imagine if every time you go to plug in a device you have to ask yourself if you feel lucky. What's worse than no electricity is bad electricity.” On storage as the key “How do we deal with this balancing? We deal with it by overcapacity and redundancy which leads to unparalleled inefficiency, underutilized assets, excessive emissions and all at greater cost to us the ratepayers. Then add to the mix the environmental imperative, which is brought on by climate change which argues for wide deployment of renewables.” “But renewables are intermittent so they themselves alone are incapable of being fully integrated into base load. Supply and demand requirement means that they're no help. Electricity at zero marginal cost that is out of balance is a problem. So how do we deal with the intermittency, overcapacity, redundancy all no greater cost? Storage is the key missing piece. Batteries would do for the electricity system what refrigeration did the food supply, or water storage does to water supply. It is compelling, so what's the obstacle to deployment of batteries? The obstacle is cost. The batteries are not of any value because they're far too costly, and they can't meet the long service life time requirement.” “Cost has to be a factor in the discovery process, so I think about cost in terms of the chemistry that we're working on. It has to be chemistry that is abundant, earth abundant and has to be simple to construct. I refused to allow my students to go to certain parts of the periodic table because the results will not scale. I disregarded everything we know about batteries and instead looked for inspiration away from the battery field. In fact I looked to a field that neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity in vast quantities. This is an aluminum smelter – it consumes vast quantities of electricity and yet it produces metal from dirt for less than one dollar a kilogram. So I knew that if I could teach this thing to not consume electricity, but to store it and then give it back at the end, I have something that's cheap.” On achieving the impossible “People still say it's crazy. It won't work. I love it there's nobody else trying to do this. This is my team in the summer of 2010. Twenty people and only one that had some background in batteries, the rest of them were all novices. So I don't hire experts, I hire anti experts. I have to tell you that 20 x 3 is far greater than 3 x 20. So if I had the same amount of money spread over 20 years with three people, I wouldn't be standing here right now. The first year their results were terrible, but I was patient and after two years good things happened. After three years they worked miracles, because they didn't know what was impossible.” “Let's say we want to bring electricity to places that don't have it, my vision is that batteries in Africa should be built by Africans, using African resources. That way they become authors of their own future. Batteries are not built in one plant in China and shipped all over the world.”