It is time to get into batteries. Waaay into batteries.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to cover how lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) work and the different chemistries that are competing for market share, but I thought I would start off with a post about why I’m doing this — why batteries are important and why it’s worth understanding the variety and competition within the space.

Lithium-ion batteries are crucial to decarbonization in two important sectors

We know that the fastest, cheapest way to decarbonize, especially over the next 10 years, is clean electrification: shifting the grid to carbon-free sources and shifting other sectors and energy services onto the grid.

LIBs are accelerating clean electrification in the two biggest-emitting sectors of the U.S. economy: transportation and electricity. (Each accounts for between a quarter and a third of emissions.)

We’ve discussed why lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are so important to decarbonizing both transportation and the electricity sector.

Next week, we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of different kinds of LIBs to see how different chemistries offer different kinds of performance benefits and are competing for different market niches.

Before that, though, it’s worth the time to do a little review of batteries and how they work. If you’re like me-a-month-ago, you probably have a hazy understanding at best of the structure of batteries and the processes involved in running them.

I’m not going to get into any deep chemistry — believe me, no one wants that — but I thought it would help to run through some basics and some terms. It will come in handy later when we get into the competition within battery markets.

Batteries 101

F---ing batteries, how do they work?

As the name suggests, electrochemical batteries store energy via chemical reaction. Discharging the battery involves a chemical reaction that produces electrons; recharging the battery involves a chemical reaction that stores electrons.

The basic unit of a battery is the cell. In the cell, two electrodes — negative (anode) and positive (cathode) — are separated by an electrolyte. The anode is a material that gives up electrons easily in chemical reactions with the electrolyte. The cathode is a material that readily absorbs them. The propensity to shed/​absorb electrons is known as standard potential, and the difference in standard potential between the anode and cathode will determine the battery’s total electrical potential. The bigger the difference, the greater the potential.

When the anode and cathode are connected in a circuit, two things happen.

First, negatively charged electrons flow from the former to the latter, generating power. The amount of power is determined by two factors:

• Current, the number of electrons traveling in a given circuit, and
• Voltage, the force with which the electrons are traveling.

Power = current × voltage. It’s like a river: The force exerted by the water depends on how much of it there is and how fast it’s moving. You can get the same force with less water if it moves faster, or with slower water if there’s more of it. Similarly, you can get the same power with less current if you have more voltage, and vice versa.

Second, the anode releases positively charged ions into the electrolyte to balance the reaction, and the cathode absorbs a commensurate amount. (Some batteries have a thin, semi-permeable barrier within the electrolyte to regulate the flow of ions.)

Recharging a battery basically involves reversing the reaction and returning the electrons and the ions to the anode.

The whole game of battery design and development is to find a combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte that performs well along a broad set of criteria: holds a lot of energy, releases energy quickly, operates safely, has a long lifetime, is cheap, etc.

The tragedy of battery development is that there are always trade-offs. High performance on one criterion generally means lower performance on another. Optimize for holding more energy and you limit how quickly energy can be released; optimize for safety and you limit how much energy it will hold; and so on.

The battery market has seen dozens of chemistries come and go, but four have stuck and scaled to achieve mass-market penetration: lead acid, nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd), nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and lithium-ion (Li-ion).

Most of the developing world still uses lead-acid batteries, a $45 billion global market. But lithium-ion batteries have been gaining ground rapidly in wealthy markets.

LIBs have hit on a combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte that performs well enough along several criteria (especially cost) to work for most short-duration applications today. They have become cheap, and manufacturing capacity has converged around them.

Let’s take a closer look at LIBs.

Lithium-ion batteries 101

LIBs have been around in commercial form since the early 1990s, though obviously they’ve improved quite a bit since then.

Today’s most common and popular LIBs use graphite (carbon) as the anode, a lithium compound as the cathode and some organic goo as an electrolyte. They boast two key advantages over prior battery chemistries.

First, they need very little electrolyte. They are what’s known as ​“intercalation” batteries, which means the same lithium ions nestled (intercalated) in the structure of the anode transfer to be intercalated in the cathode during discharge. The electrolyte only has to serve as a conduit; it doesn’t have to store many ions. Consequently, the cell doesn’t need much of it. Saving on electrolyte saves space and weight. (Bonus: The process is almost perfectly reversible, which gives LIBs their high cycle life.)

Second, LIBs squeeze lots of energy into a small space. Lithium is the lightest metal (at the upper left corner of the periodic table) and extremely energy-dense, so LIB cells can work with electrodes only 0.1 millimeters thick. (Compare lead-acid electrodes, which are several millimeters thick.) This also makes LIBs smaller and lighter.

Because they are lightweight and have high energy density, LIBs got their initial foothold in small electronic devices, phones, laptops and the like. They scaled up quickly to run handheld power tools and lawnmowers and then completely took over electric vehicles. Recently they’ve scaled up further to create giant stationary battery arrays for grid storage.

It’s worth noting that even the biggest grid battery is just stacks upon stacks of cells, like Lego bricks. LIBs are extremely modular — they can be scaled precisely to need.

LIB manufacturing

There are a number of ways to manufacture LIB cells, but the most common for portable and EV applications is the cylindrical cell. Think of it like a jelly roll. A super-thin metal anode is coated with a film (usually graphite). Then a super-thin separator is laid on top. Then a super-thin metal cathode coated with a film (usually some lithium compound) is laid on top of that. Several layers are stacked this way, and then then whole thing is rolled up and packed into a cylinder. Before the cylinder is capped, electrolyte goo is injected to infuse between the layers.

Cells are then clustered together into modules, which in turn are clustered together into packs.

There’s a whole active area of LIB innovation around cell design. Tesla recently debuted a new, bigger cylinder cell, the 4680 (46 millimeters wide, 80 mm tall), with improved… well, everything.

Welcome back to Battery Week! So far, we’ve talked about why lithium-ion batteries are so important, and we went through a basic primer on how they work. Today, we’re going to get into the competition within the broad lithium battery family, among all the different kinds of batteries that use lithium and exchange charged lithium ions. (See the previous post for a full list.)

There are a few clear leaders — lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA) and lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) — that have achieved mass-market scale. Several others are looking to get in on the action.

The market prize is likely to exceed a trillion dollars within the next decade, so if any of these competitors can even carve out a substantial niche, it could be worth billions. Let’s look at the players.

Better NMC and NCA

The bulk of lithium-ion battery research these days is aimed at improving the dominant batteries on the market, mainly by reducing the amount of cobalt (the most toxic and expensive ingredient) required for manufacturing.

Most EV makers use NMC batteries; Tesla uses NCA. In the past, it has been difficult to push down the amount of cobalt in these batteries (it plays an important balancing role), but manufacturer LG recently introduced an NMC 811 battery: 80 percent nickel, 10 percent manganese, 10 percent cobalt. GM will use them in its new line, including in the Hummer, and Tesla will put them in some of its Model 3s in China.

Most big battery manufacturers, including Panasonic (which supplies many of Tesla’s batteries), have vowed to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate cobalt.

Nickel is the key to energy density. Tesla, VW and others are working on unique high-nickel battery varieties that will be used for specialty vehicles that require extra-high energy density, like larger SUVs and trucks.

But not every vehicle needs that, and nickel supply constraints are looming, so work is also being done to further boost the use of manganese — a much more stable, abundant material — and reduce cobalt.

Hello! Welcome back to Battery Week — where we use the term ​“week” somewhat loosely.

Up until now, we’ve been focusing on lithium-on batteries (LIBs) — why they are so important, how they work, and the varieties of LIBs that are battling it out for the biggest battery market, electric vehicles (EVs).

It’s fairly clear from that discussion that LIBs, in some incarnation, are going to dominate EVs for a long while to come. There is no other commercial battery that can pack as much power into as small a space and lightweight a package. Plus, LIBs have built up a large manufacturing base, driving down prices with scale and industry experience. Their lock on the EV market is likely unbreakable, at least for the foreseeable future.

But there’s another battery market where some competitors hope to get a foothold: grid storage. They think there’s space in that market waiting to be claimed.

Currently, there’s a robust and growing short-duration grid storage market, offering storage of anywhere from seconds (to provide grid services like voltage and frequency regulation) to four hours. LIBs have about 99 percent of that market locked up; in some areas, projects with solar power coupled with four hours of storage are bidding in competitively with natural gas.

Most energy wonks believe that in order to fully shift the grid to zero-carbon energy, we will eventually need long-duration storage as well, to the tune of weeks, months or even seasons. LIBs are almost certainly not going to cut it for that purpose, so it will be some combination of other technologies. (I’ll write about long-duration storage some other time.)

In between short and long, there’s something that might be called mid-duration storage, covering the range between four and 24 hours. What technologies will cover that range? LIBs can do it, of course — theoretically they can cover any duration; you just stack more and more batteries — but the economics get extremely difficult. Mid-duration projects will require lots of capacity but might run comparatively rarely. As duration gets to four hours and above, the cost of LIBs, at least today’s LIBs, starts to get prohibitive.

This is where other batteries come in, challengers to LIBs that hope to beat them at longer durations — though they aren’t quite there yet. ​“There really aren’t competitive technologies in the battery electric vehicle space aside from all these different lithium-ion batteries,” says Chloe Holzinger, an energy storage analyst at IHS Markit. But, she added, ​“there’s a ton of different battery technologies for grid storage. They just tend to be significantly more expensive than lithium-ion batteries.”

Companies offering these challengers believe they are better suited to the needs of the mid-duration grid storage market, where energy density matters less than capacity, calendar and cycle life, and safety. They think they can bring costs down to competitive levels at those durations. (Some of them think they can find other niches as well, but it’s grid storage that offers the most realistic shot.)

Flow batteries

Flow batteries operate on a fundamentally different principle than the batteries we’ve looked at so far. Rather than storing energy in metals on the electrodes, they store energy as a dissolved metal in an aqueous electrolyte.

The anolyte is stored in one tank; the catholyte is stored in another. Pumps circulate the fluids past electrodes (sometimes in a fuel cell) where they don’t quite mix, thanks to a thin separator, but they exchange ions and electrons, generating electricity.

The key conceptual difference is that flow batteries separate energy (the amount stored) from power (the rate at which it can be released). If you want more power, you make the electrodes bigger. If you want to store more energy, you make the tanks of electrolytes bigger. And electrolytes are fairly cheap, so it’s cheap to increase capacity.

This is in contrast to LIBs, which double in cost with each doubling of energy capacity.