[inglor_cz]

I am a bit surprised that a engineer-heavy forum does not think about scaling of batteries.

If everyone in the developed world starts to build batteries massively - in the extent necessary to bridge multiple days of bad weather for millions of people, because that is what happens quite often in northern half of Europe in winter - there will be new strategic dependencies, at least during the buildup phase, and then in a smaller extent for maintenance and modernization. Instead of oil, lithium and other resources not present or not mined in Europe will become worth fighting over and blackmailing over.

When we are already undergoing such a massive transformation, I would like to have a bit more strategic independence, instead of trading Arab/Iranian/Russia pressure for Chinese/Bolivian/Congolese pressure.

Ultimately, we must hope for fusion and/or geothermal to become practical. These are nigh impossible to be subjected to geopolitical constraints.

[tfourb]

There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium and drastically reduce the usage of other suplly-contrained inputs. Especially for stationary storage (where energy density and weight are not much of a concern) there is a wide array of technologies already available and in development.

And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterioration, but nothing even close to the "just in time" dependency that we are experiencing in this very moment when it comes to fossil fuels.

For a strategic independence point of view, being reliant on a global value chain to replace existing infrastructure every 15 years beats being reliant on a global value chain to replace your tank of gas every day by miles. Don't let perfect become the enemy of good!

[inglor_cz]

These need to be available in enormous quantities, though.

Are they? Who produces them? Please tell me that it is not China and that they don't come with a firmware that may or may not have remotely exploitable rootkits.

The road from a lab discovery through a working prototype to mass-deployable tech usually takes decades, especially in devices which pack a tremendous amount of energy.

[tfourb]

The manufacturing of all modern battery chemistries is dominated by Chinese companies because the Chinese government has strategically invested in production capacity and expertise for more than two decades.

But Chinese companies are running and building production facilities around the world. Leaving the production in Chinese hands is a political choice, not an inevitability.

Also, you can't take batteries away once you have delivered them to the customer. I have a 14kwh battery in my basement. It's built by BYD, a Chinese company. But once installed, I can pull the network cable and air gap it from the internet. Communication with my roof-mounted-solar and grid-tied electrical supply works without external network access, if I deem that an unacceptable risk. I could also do the work required to filter all network request from the battery management system at the router to make sure it can only contact servers from a whitelist, if I want to have access to diagnostics while I'm not at home.

These are all known, manageable risks that are completely within the capability of sovereign states to take care of. But there is literally no government (apparently) that can keep Trump and Netanyahu from fucking over the global fossil energy supply on a whim.

[adrian_b]

Indeed, at least 2 Chinese companies (CATL and BYD) already have in mass production sodium-ion batteries, including a 50 MWh model for stationary storage.

Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is a historical accident, because using lithium makes sense only in mobile applications where weight is essential.

For new installations, sustainable alternatives, like sodium-ion batteries, should be preferred.

In the past there have been many companies in various countries, including Australia, UK and USA, which have claimed that they are able to make very high capacity flow batteries for stationary storage, based on various chemistries, e.g. vanadium-vanadium or bromine-sulfur. A few such batteries have been installed at various customers.

I do not know what went wrong with flow batteries. They have bad weight, similar to the lead-acid batteries, but that is irrelevant for stationary batteries. Otherwise they should be the best batteries for stationary applications, because they have 3 essential advantages over other batteries. Their energy and their power are not coupled as in normal batteries, but they can be scaled independently, i.e. for a given power (which is determined by electrode area) in a flow battery the stored energy can be made arbitrarily large, because it is determined by the volume of a couple of tanks where liquid electrolytes are stored. The second advantage is that the auto-discharge when the battery is not used can be almost null, because the 2 electrolytes can be stored in separate tanks, preventing any reaction between them. The third advantage is that the solid electrodes do not take part in the chemical reaction, so they are not damaged by a charge/discharge cycle, so they can have a very long life.

Despite the advantages, none of the many kinds of flow batteries that have been proposed has been a commercial success and it appears that the companies producing them have lied about the problems that might plague them.

I have not seen any published information about which were their problems, but I assume that a likely cause was the separator membrane that stays between the 2 liquid electrolytes, which must selectively allow the passage of certain ions and not of others. Such membranes are expensive and they might have a short lifetime, requiring frequent maintenance. Another possible problem could be caused by secondary reactions leading to solid precipitates from the liquid electrolytes, another possible cause for expensive maintenance.

Regarding the battery firmware, it does not really matter if the batteries are made in China. The history of the last 3 decades has demonstrated that no firmware can be trusted, regardless whether it comes from a company located in USA, in UK, in China or in any other country, so any firmware must be treated with suspicion.

China actually makes a great number of electronic products that are much more trustworthy than almost anything that comes from USA or other western countries, because those products, like it was the norm several decades ago, but no longer today, are accompanied by full hardware documentation, including schematics and PCB layout, which makes it much easier to verify that a malicious firmware would not be able to do damage.

If the European Union or any other countries would be concerned by the security risk posed by malicious firmware, the solution is simple and it does not consist in banning the products of some arbitrarily chosen countries, but in mandating that any product with an embedded computer, regardless of its origin, must provide complete documentation, i.e. schematics and the source program for the firmware, and it should allow the replacement of the firmware. This would be nothing new, as this is how computers, including the IBM PC, were sold in the old times, before the vendors succeeded step by step to incline the balance of power in their favor and in the detriment of their customers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium

Not being mass produced. Betting on multiple horses makes sense. It's perhaps the singular lesson from the present problem.