In our sponsored webinars with Honeywell earlier this year, members of the company's Process Solutions team mentioned that the company had been working on a long-duration battery storage technology and that an announcement would be made in due course. Contact online >>
In our sponsored webinars with Honeywell earlier this year, members of the company''s Process Solutions team mentioned that the company had been working on a long-duration battery storage technology and that an announcement would be made in due course.
Also, we understand that this product has been developed through Honeywell Universal Oil Products (UOP), whereas your lithium-ion battery storage systems and services offerings have largely been delivered through Honeywell Process Solutions.
We''ve been working on it for a few yearswe got interested in this space, we saw a core need for a battery that’s longer duration, a utility-scale battery that uses non-rare earth elements. We have a fundamental belief that utility-scale batteries have got to use a non-rare earth element.
As for why Honeywell UOP for flow batteries: well, a flow battery looks a lot like a [power] plant, just on a lot smaller scale. You have the flow of material, just like you have in an oil or gas petrochemical plant, you have ion exchange, you have the need to be fundamental in chemistry and molecular science, which is UOP''s core value proposition to the market.
And you have to be fundamental in membranes. We’ve been putting membranes in the market for 30 years, we have our own membrane facility, we test and launch our own membranes. So the combination of those things allowed us to develop in the space.
We’re going to be bringing together the management and process control capabilities of Honeywell Process Solutions, and kind of the chemistry and know how, of UOP on the battery side, to launch this battery.
We’re not talking about the exact chemistry but it is a non-rare earth element. It uses easy to source materials, and we really like its ability to scale up and down. The characteristics of a flow battery, I think really lends itself well to the utility industry.
At the utility-scale, density is not your primary driver. We really liked that space for its cost profile, and for the ability not to be coupled with a supply chain that could run into challenges that could swing drastically.
How about the development process? We’ve seen flow battery technology adopted by the renewable sector, but more broadly, the energy tech sector, from the early groundwork by people like NASA and academics decades ago. How much of the development started from scratch with what you guys are doing and what’s the process been like? What have been some of the challenges that you’ve overcome along the way?
We started from scratch. We’re really good at optimising chemistry. So if you look at UOP''s core history, we’re fundamental in molecular science, we''re fundamental in the chemistries.
Not to say we haven’t had our experiences with all the challenges, you have with a flow battery around leakage. That’s something we’ve been fundamental on, really making sure we hit the segment correctly. That’s why we really like our partnership with Duke — it''s really dialling into what the utility segment''s going to be looking for.
In terms of what utilities will be looking for, over the last few years, as battery storage has come into the market, at Energy-Storage.news we were initially mostly reporting on projects with perhaps 15 minutes of storage, typically doing frequency regulation. That''s crept up — or perhaps even jumped up — to one, two-hour systems and now we''re at the point that four-hour is probably the most common among projects announced in the US.
I think that four hours is really also a dependency on the lithium-ion side. As more wind and solar come on the grid, we hear from utilities and we see in our own modelling, eight to 10 to 12 hours [duration] is really going to be the driver of energy storage over time. That full 12 hours is what we’re going to need.
You also need some seasonal storage. That’s most likely going to be accomplished by hydrogen. But we see in our modelling that you can get to more than 50% wind and solar on the grid with a battery that runs 12 hours. We think this is the spot to develop in.
We see the forecasts for wind and solar, we see the direction of wind and solar [deployment], but that’s going to hit an upper bound if batteries don’t follow us shortly. I think we’re not late, we''re not early, we’re kind of right where we need to be!
One other aspect of flow batteries that flow battery companies and their investors often like to impress on the market is safety. While I think it is widely accepted that there is less fire risk and therefore less mitigation required for flow batteries than lithium, I''m yet to see that cited very often as a reason a utility is choosing to procure flow batteries at scale
As Honeywell, we''re in both spaces. We do process control and management for lithium-ion [battery storage]. Lithium-ion batteries, while they’re more energy dense, they have to be greatly spaced out because of the safety concerns: they need cooling, they need fire prevention and gas detection systems, they need a lot of control.
So, I see this as more a cost argument. Because both these batteries, lithium and flow, will deploy safety systems that are inherently safe, and the end user will demand it. But I see it more as a barrier on lithium-ion to go to a larger scale, this gigawatt-scale, that these large-scale deployments need.
From the late prototype stage, we’ve been working in their feedback, asking them where they see the market, where they’re looking to develop. They’re obviously testing multiple chemistries — we see them as an ideal partner, because they have this kind of micro grid centre, where you can do real world testing at their Mount Holly facility.
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