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What about a future with this environment but then without the power plant on it?
It could very well be the future. The reason: LFP batteries, like the ones in the Ya and in the new electric cars (almost) never get ‘old’ anymore.

Some 10 years ago the LFP battery started to conquer its place in the market. In 2021 the batteries were installed on the Ya. But still that was expensive. Now, they have become cheaper and cheaper. The battery is also very effective. The kWh per kilo weight has increased, so the range in kilometers an electric car can make, increased. The electric car is becoming a competitor to the fossil car.

Another major disadvantage of a battery was the aging. With every charge, the capacity decreases slightly. After about 1,000 charging cycles, only 80 percent remained, meaning you had 24 kWh of power in your battery instead of 30, good for a ride of only 144 kilometers. At that point, the battery is considered old and due for replacement. On average, you achieved 162 kilometers over those first 1,000 charging cycles, making a total of 162,000 kilometers.

The LFP batteries last longer—1,500 instead of 1,000 cycles—before reaching 80 percent. The more modern LFP battery even reaches 5,000 charging cycles.

Translate that into kilometers, and for lithium-ion, you get 1,500 times 90 percent times 65 kWh times 6 kilometers (in fact, that could already be 7). That is 526,500 kilometers. At 13,000 kilometers per year (the Dutch average for passenger cars), the battery already lasts 40 years before it ‘needs’ to be replaced. The LFP battery only reaches 80 percent after 1.7 million kilometers, or 135 years.

No car lasts that long. We like to trade in good cars because the new version has extra safety features and new gadgets. On average, I think a car lasts ten years now. And if we start living more frugally, the current electric car might reach twenty years. By then, the lithium-ion battery will still be good for 90 percent charging capacity, and the LFP is not yet ‘as good as new’.

You aren’t going to throw those batteries away; that would be madness. So, a second life for batteries is being devised. That already happened in 2018, when the first batteries from crashed cars became available. The Johan Cruijff Arena in Amsterdam was equipped with about a hundred ‘old’ car batteries that could store a combined 2,800 kWh of electricity. When combined, the lights in the Arena were literally visible. The test turned out well, and the battery park has since been expanded to 8,600 kWh, or 8.6 MWh.

Second-hand batteries are now appearing in more and more places to store electricity on a large scale. The amount of car batteries we discard annually is growing rapidly. Last year alone, we bought 156,000 electric cars (plus another 176,000 hybrids with smaller batteries). If these are discarded after more than fifteen years, ten million kWh of batteries become available for reuse almost for free. And that happens every year. Within a few years, you will have enough old batteries to cover the electricity demand of the entire evening peak.

And that is just talking about passenger cars. More and more buses are driving electric, and by now, half of all new trucks in China are electric. Then you are not talking about batteries of 65, but of 650 kWh. And they will all be discarded eventually.

China, the country where most batteries are manufactured, has already calculated that by 2050, old batteries could cover two-thirds of its total energy demand.

This will have great consequenses. First, we will all get a battery pack at home, and a big one at work. This will shave the peeks in the electricity usage. The electricity can become cheaper. And it can be sustainable, because there will be no more fossil power plants necessary.

Second, the network can change completely. Now the electricity network is based on security of supply. But if we all have our own decentralized power in stored, we don’t need power when it is not available for a day or more. The electricity network can do what it is good at: just transport electricity.

It means that we won’t need power plants. Also the nuclear energy plants will be obsolete. The LFP battery fills the gab to create a sustainable energy use.

So, what about a future with this environment but then without the power plant on it?

We are continuing, and we are working on all sorts of jobs. Here an impression.

Using the energy where it matters, says Joe Horber. He electrified the propulsion of his sailing yacht. So he is our new fossil free fellow.

Josef started dreaming

Josef started dreaming about discovering remote islands in the Pacific Ocean as a child, born in Romania, 900 Km away from the next sea and 2200 Km from the next ocean. On the way to the Pacific islands he is at least living now at the Baltic Sea side in Kiel, Germany, he owns the 31 Foot sailing yacht WINDSONG and discovers with her the South West Baltic Sea.

As a sailor, Josef is admiring the beauty of nature and he is concerned about the climate change. Therefore, he is passionate about protecting the environment and reducing his own carbon footprint.

He converted the propulsion system of WINDSONG from a traditional Diesel engine to an electric POD motor, running on a LiFePo4 battery charged by shore power as a first step. With increasingly more time & mileage spent on board, he will convert cooking & heating to electricity as well. At the same time, he will add solar panels, a wind turbine and other renewable energy sources in order to make his boat able to sail long distance with zero emissions.

Josef is happy to share his own experience with others and he developed the web site www.yachtelektroantrieb.de in order to promote emission free sailing, electric propulsion systems and his own conversion project as a case study

We see a sharp curve in the sales of batteries. The lead acid battery is already more expensive per year than the Lithium-ion battery. The latter is unsafe, it can suddenly explode, catch fire, and keeps on burning, sometimes for days. More and more we have to acknowlegde that is not a sustainable battery for the future. Sorry, Tesla drivers. The Chinese BYD cas has the LFP battery. Originally this company was a battery manufacturer, and now it makes cars that cheap, these compete all electric cars in price and quality (again: sorry, Tesla drivers). The only thing that saves the other companies is the tariff wall for Chinese cars, in Europe and in the USA.

Till here the batteries that you need between home and work. Now, let us discuss the future for the batteries at home and work? That is enormous. More and more there is congestion on the electricity networks in many dense populated western areas. We see it all over the world: in California, in Germany, in the Netherlands.

Use the grid for transport, not for reliability

Johan Elslin, the president of the IEEE Power Electronics Society and researcher envisions that wer will never ever be able to maintain a reliable grid. Partly because the electricity consumption keeps on growing and partly because So let us stop with the attitude, the ambition, the laws, that that all consumers should have a certain garanteed electricity supply. Let us use it what it is generally built for: the transport of electricity.

He has a point here. The grid can’t keep up, we have to acknowledge that. one has to admit, that most private consumers can live a day without electricity, whereas hospitals can not miss 5 minutes before the first people die.

Perhaps a liberal point of view? Well, It would save a lot of investments on the grid. And now that batteries become more durable, more reliable, his approach is becoming more and more a realistic approach. Let every company check for himself the necessity for a reliable supply. And every consumer who cannot agree with a minimum reliability, will take a home battery. Or, now that the smart grid becomes a succes and the idea of the decentalized holons seem to work, it could be reality.

But, the price of the battery? On the Ya the complete 42,5 kWh batterybank for a stand alone household has cost nearly 20,000 Euros. That is very expensive. Good news: nowadays, so five years later, it would cost 12,000. And prices keep dropping.

Why a batterybank anyway?

There are three reasons.

Right now, hospitals and computer servers companies don’t want their diesel generation system anymore as a backup and they all choose for the battery bank. That is the reliability reason.

Second reason is the congestion. In the Netherlands, the Den Bosch area has so much congestion risk on the grid, that no company can get an electricity connection. So, they are developing their own solutions, with… battery banks.

The third and final reason is the economical thing that is looming. Since 3 years, the Dutch Next Energy offers a home battery solution that is paying its money back in some circumstances. The bank is LFP (Lithium Ferro Phosphate), so not the dangerous Lithium-ion. But most people only get 10-15% back on every kilowatthour, compared to the price of about 40 cents they have to buy it from.

These same high electricity prices deliver the opportunity regenerate your own energy, and to store it. In theory, you can even make a bit of profit. You take electricity from the grid when the supply is too big, such as on a sunny day, and you supply it back when the price is high. But now, for most people that is too costly, or, say it different, the batteries are too expensive.

To a cheap home battery

The market has become large and the growth of 10-15% makes it very interesting. So there are great investments in research and development. This makes the opportunities grow fast now.

A new competitor of the LFP battery is the Sodium-ion battery. It promises to be cheaper and more durable than the LFP, but it can contain less energy.

Another one is the salt water battery. It works very simple, and salt and water are cheap. The life is very long. But it costs a lot of space, too much often to make it fit for an urban house and for a large scale manufacturing and economy. Or, to phrase it differently, it is so cheap and it can be so well customized, that it is difficult to make a business model out of it.

There is a new ‘liquid battery’ promises to make energy storage much more affordable, both for giant batteries for solar farms and for you and me at home. The development of so-called flow batteries is moving fast. These are batteries that work with two liquids that, when combined, produce electricity, and conversely, can be separated by electricity. The Dutch company Elestor has already made significant progress with such a battery. If their pilot battery works as expected, Elestor should be able to supply the first large industrial batteries within a few years.

Flow batteries have tanks in which the liquids are stored separately and a tank where the liquid ends up after mixing. Between them is a so-called membrane. This is a kind of super sieve that allows some ions to pass through and others not. When mixed, electrons are released at the membrane, creating a current that can be used to power machines. The fluids and tanks for the system are inexpensive, so you can build a large battery for little money. But flow batteries also have a drawback: the membranes are expensive and break down over time.

Now, British startup from the University of Manchester, HalioGen Power is working on a fluid battery that no longer requires a membrane. This saves enormously on costs, not only in the initial purchase, but also because no membranes need to be replaced. That’s not the only advantage of the system. They also no longer need separate tanks to store the two fluids. According to HalioGen Power, the fluids their flow battery uses are inexpensive and non-flammable. This makes their system suitable for a wide range of applications. They state on their website that the battery can be used in situations from 10 to millions of kilowatts. This covers everything from an average home to large-scale industrial applications.

It would make a really cheap battery.

A batterybank in every home.