By Vuslat Bayoglu
The year started on a setback note for the energy transition: one of the world’s largest lithium-ion batteries, central to the storage of intermittent solar and wind power, was gutted by fire.
Located in the Monterey County coast in California, the 750 megawatts storage facility was still new, with the construction of the latest phase having been completed in 2023. On the face of it the blaze that has potentially turned green dreams into smoke ignited internally. However, investigators are yet to establish the cause.
The tragedy at what was supposed to be the lodestar of the energy transition has puzzled owner Vistra Energy and US authorities. But, as Politico, a US-based news site reported, the accident was not unprecedented. The battery complex had suffered damage from a malfunctioning heat detector in 2021. And fire had broken out at a nearby Tesla-supplied battery storage facility in 2022.
There is a common denominator in all these cases: lithium. It’s an extremely volatile mineral and yet indispensable ingredient to battery storage technology. Its deployment in a large battery complex is a new technological attempt to bridge the energy gap that comes naturally with the unreliability of solar and wind.
Lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, used in the manufacture of the storage batteries, are sensitive to impurities that can trigger fire. Even worse in volatility is lithium metal, which holds better storage capacity compared to the other two variants extracted after processing.
Lithium-ion battery storage technology is yet to reach reliability, safety and reasonable durability when deployed at a large scale. The world is still at an experimental stage, even though the haste towards green energy transition means there is reluctance, globally, to admit that the technology is far from reaching the “tried-and-tested” stage of fossil-fuel based technologies.
Governments around the world are under pressure to transform national electricity grids to accommodate battery storage technologies to meet their net zero climate goals. Some are even making the mistake of shutting down their fossil-fuel plants, causing unnecessary spike in energy prices.
The pressure and unreasonable expectations must be moderated by the reality that technological developments take a long time and effort to reach near-perfect stages. US investment bank JP Morgan last year correctly warned of the need for a “reality check” on phasing out fossil fuels while energy demand keeps rocketing.
The established fossil-fuel based energy generation and nuclear technologies didn’t develop overnight. Lithium-ion battery storage will take its own time to reach the desired stage. Whether it will ever replace established baseload capacities to power a country and energy intensive industries remains to be seen. It is for researchers, not lobbyists, to determine in their laboratories.
As South African policy makers consider procuring expensive battery storage plants, they should be mindful of the fact that their proper functioning cannot be guaranteed. The risk is heightened by the fact that we have a fragile fiscus that doesn’t have a war chest for expensive experiments unless investors are prepared to take large share of the risks.
The evolution of the lithium-ion battery itself tells the story of private sector-driven adventures. As things stand, lithium-ion batteries are useful in small packages such as in watches, mobile phones and, increasingly, in electric-powered vehicles. To reach even this stage, however, the technology went through a long journey of over 100 years. Along the way, spanning America, Europe and now China, there were fires.
In his book Volt Rush, Henry Sanderson summarises the key historical moments of the lithium-ion technology. After scornfully dismissing the rechargeable lead-acid battery as a “catch-penny, a sensation, mechanism for swindling by stocking companies”, Thomas Edison, the lightbulb inventor, invested his time and money to create a car battery, starting in 1900. His A-12 nickel storage battery was outclassed by Henry Ford’s petrol engine.
Petrochemical producer ExxonMobil at some stage entered the battery race, funding Stanley Whittingham to research it. In 1977, Whittingham’s Exxon battery was exhibited. From then, Exxon started producing button size batteries for Swiss watches. However, Whittingham’s car battery encountered two problems: Exxon quit the project when oil prices fell making the combustion engine more economical. Once again, a fossil fuel won. In addition, his battery had weaknesses: it had less than 2.5 volts and was prone to catching fire.
Enter John Goodenough, who added his own ingenuity to the idea after it had fallen out of favour with potential investors. From his Oxford laboratory he developed a stable battery using lithium cobalt oxide that could withstand repeated insertion and extraction of lithium ions as the battery charged and discharged.
His invention was taken up by Akira Yoshino who wanted to make small-form batteries for small gadgets. He found petroleum coke that could hold lithium ions in small quantities. Completed in 1985, his invention was commercialised by Sony in 1991.
It took a century from the time when Edison tried and failed in his expensive venture to the point when the likes of Elon Musk could produce electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries. Granted, the availability and reliability of oil made for good economics than batteries. Strangely, it is miraculously expected that gigantic batteries to power up cities and countries could suddenly be the norm.
Yet the economics still favour fossil fuels. It will remain like this until gigantic batteries can prove their worth, in terms of safety, storage capabilities, availability of huge amounts of battery metals and durability for them to become a replacement technology.
One wonders, though, whether some elements of history might note repeat itself in the battle for a greener future as ExxonMobil is among major companies investing millions of dollars to implement carbon capture and utilisation technologies that could prolong the use of fossil fuels. The race to perfect battery storage technologies, including extinguishing the fires, is up against the race to cure carbon emissions in existing reliable fossil fuel technologies.
But if we consider the fact that that Lithium purities are extracted in 24-hour run coal-fired power stations in China, as Sanderson has observed, then we have a mutual symbiosis than competition between renewables and fossil fuels. And the transition is proving to be more complex than many would wish.
Vuslat Bayoglu is a co-founder and managing director of Menar.
BUSINESS REPORT