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Many thank Alfa for clarifying. Always concerning when you hear new 'emerging' batteries where you don't understand the technology or lack of.
Love the Unicorn phrase!!
Bespooked - do not befooled by the discussion of the 'footprint' of their utility scale energy storage system. I do not believe that they even have kWh sized system made with this approach so talking about multi megawatt hour sized installations is pure hype.
somtam - if you compare this with the complexity of this idea with scaling energy storage in a vanadium flow battery (take V2O5, dissolve in Sulphuric acid, pour into tank) you will see just what a nonsense their thing is. Cripes it doesn't even scale into the second dimension well as wafers can be made only so big - at the recent intersolar exhibition I was interested to see a 4m long 300mm diameter boule of silicon that is used to make PV panels. Out of this they get about 4000 wafers of c. 0.7mm thick (i.e. 30% already lost). I was told that the boule costs around $1M - so around $250 per wafer from this estimate.
How does this compare with other published data ? - Well https://semiengineering.com/mixed-outlook-for-silicon-wafer-biz/ shows 2018 production of 12,700 Million square inches at a cost of 11 Billion dollars - So roughly 12e9 Square inches for 12e9 dollars - or a dollar per square inch. A 12 inch wafer is about 110 square inches so $110 dollars - so we're looking at 100-250 dollars per single wafer.
How many wafers might they require for, say a car, even if they could get 4 times the energy density. Well the battery pack on a tesla weighs 540Kg, so if you only had, say 125Kg of silicon wafers, how many would this be ? Well a standard 300mm wafer is 125g ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_(electronics) ) so this brings us precisely to the 1000 wafer mark. That's already $100,000 before you have even though about etching them or adding anything else to them.
These claims are about as credible as wishing for a unicorn.
There has been some mentions of silicon storage in the past but this is the first industrial scale proposal I've heard of. Thoughts: 1. it seems to have a slightly smaller physical footprint than VRB at 1MW in a container 2. Exciting that there is another set of investors putting their money into finding a solution to the same problem 3. BE was never ever going to be the only player 4. BE is way ahead in commercialising
Seems like a good idea!
The problem with conventional Li ion cells is that they contain effectively a single cathode and anode. Dendrite can grow on the surface of them and it is these that can cause the shorting at best killing the cell, at worst causing a fire.
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/three-ways-lithium-dendrites-grow/78500767259733
This uses a sheet of silicon with millions of separate cathodes or anodes on them, each acting as its own cell, if a dendrite does grow from one and shorts, you have killed one of your million odd cells so the drop in output in barely registered. The size of the short is so small that there is unlikely to be sufficient heat generated to cause thermal runaway.
Many Thanks Alfacomp
Great explaination
Firstly a politician becoming a battery entrepreneur with claims that they can provide not only four times the energy density, but also four times the lifetime, AND at half the cost of a well established Lithium-ion battery industry worth tens of Billions of dollars sounds incredible. Because it is.
Then you get to the technical stuff - so not content with having to base it on silicon wafer technology they conclude that you need to etch half of the stuff away to make a silicon wafer sponge. Does this start to sound expensive ? Well it should do because it is. How expensive is a computer memory ? - actually pretty cheap because the active elements have over decades of research been scaled to incredibly tiny dimension.
You do not get the same benefit with battery energy storage - there is bugger all benefit in making the batteries any smaller, in fact you simply make more work for yourself and you cannot store any more energy. This is a nonsense idea, which is the reason it has been in 'stealth' mode, and is also the reason it will stay there.