OREANDA-NEWS. April 09, 2015. Picture a familiar scenario. Your work day has over run, and you find yourself on a platform waiting for a train that isn’t coming. You attempt to call your spouse to say you’ll be late home for whatever’s left of your cold, sorry dinner. Then it happens. The last little magical bar of power on your smartphone disappears, the screen goes blank and the device switches off. Fellow train-spotters nod in sympathy as you shake your phone, and wonder aloud, “But I only just charged the darn thing!”

For though the technology that powers your iPhone or Samsung Galaxy may be more powerful than the computers that got men to the moon, the lithium battery that powers it (and your PCs, laptops, watches and digital cameras) may as well be housed in a glass case in the ancient history section of London’s Science Museum.

Since Sony rolled out the first commercial rechargeable lithium-ion battery in 1991, there have been improvements to their performance, but in the world of batteries there’s been no true quantum leap, technology-wise.

The power of metals

News, however, reaches us this week that Stanford University braniacs (see: scientists) have developed  ‘an ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery.’

And here’s why the guy on the platform with the dead phone should rejoice: Aluminum batteries are low cost, and tests have shown the speed at which they will be able to recharge your electronic goods is “unprecedented.” Imagine it taking a single minute to get full power back, and seeing it go through 7,500 recharge cycles without any capacity loss. Now that’s what you call progress.

Furthermore, “the new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it”, says Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. Which is news that I’m sure you’ll agree will have us sleeping more soundly in our beds — or reaching for our nearest power tools.

And yes, there is still an issue around the lower voltage the battery produces, but it’s surely a matter of time before those wonderful Stanford boffins or their competitors find a solution to that.

The larger power storage problem

So, why so much thought and investment in small-scale domestic use batteries? The answer is simple: demand. Smart phone and tablet sales in the last decade have helped the likes of Apple become trillion dollar companies.  There’s a clear demand signal to both the market and to scientists supporting that industry of the need to continue to develop the components used in the burgeoning portable technology field.

The technology used in large-scale electric power storage faces the opposite scenario. The signals for investment and development are best described as absent. Power demand and prices across Europe, as in a great many industrialised nations around the globe, have been low for some time. In the present climate it’s potentially a huge financial risk to spend money on both building storage systems, and integrating them into your power network.

Worldwide, pumped-storage hydroelectricity is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available. And it takes huge amounts of money, large slices of land, and often governmental support to get that in operation. In Austria, a 420 MW pumped storage plant being built now is costing €380 million (min) — not far off a million Euro a MW. In Lagobianco, Switzerland, a 1,000 MW project has been costed at €1.16 billion. The economics in a depressed price environment often simply do not add up.

Let alone kissing goodbye to millions you might not see back, this technology often requires substantial transmission investment, many years to plan and authorize and is often environmentally disruptive to build.

With an ongoing need to provide balanced, stable power grids, support the development of manufacturing and engineering industries, and to ward off burning the pockets of billions of end-users with rising power prices, the world needs a superior power storage solution.

But it’s in the long term that the gap between power storage need and the technology that meets that need will become stark.

With the phase out of nuclear and coal in Europe by 2025, smarter, more efficient means of capturing and storing renewable energy — which is intermittent by its very nature — will become absolutely paramount. When you factor in that sudden cloud cover can reduce output from a photovoltaic farm by 70% within a minute, far smarter systems need to be in place to capture and solar output at peak times.

Are there other tech solutions available? Well, the likes of French based company Saft are actively marketing their containerized battery storage systems which are designed to radically reduce the rate of output losses from intermittent renewables such as solar and wind. Yet the costs of this system on a far larger scale have not been quantified, and it’s hard not to feel that building gigantic lithium batteries is not the massive step forward that the power storage technology truly needs.

And that technology needs to be developed and supported right now if that largely post-fossil phase is to ever become a reality for power generation.

As it stands now, like the guy stranded on the train platform staring at his dead smart phone, the market seems to have run out of power to get the message across.