How will lithium industry choose the development trend of power battery?

Solar energy has always been considered as environmental energy. The cost of solar panels and wind turbines has fallen dramatically over the past 10 years, making them increasingly competitive against coal and natural gas. However, the development and direction of batteries carrying electric energy will affect the development of this technology project.

Now, the same thing is happening to batteries, which will make electric vehicles cheaper and allow the grid to store excess energy to provide when needed. It is estimated that by 2040, the demand for batteries in the transportation industry will increase nearly 40 times, which will bring more and more pressure to the raw material supply chain. The growth of the number of global electric vehicles will increase the demand for electricity. The supply of lithium battery raw materials may become a problem.

Unlike solar panels, if no action is taken to solve the problem of shortage of key raw materials, the production of new batteries alone is not enough to ensure the continuous decline in prices. Lithium batteries contain cobalt and other rare metals. The price of cobalt has doubled in the past two years, increasing the production cost of batteries.

In the past eight years, the cost of lithium batteries, measured by the amount of electricity generated per kilowatt hour, has dropped by 75%. But the price rise will bring more and more pressure to the raw material supply chain. Therefore, automobile manufacturers have begun to use lithium batteries, which use 75% less cobalt than current technology.

The good news is that the battery industry is not only trying to increase the energy storage of batteries with the same amount of raw materials, but also trying to turn to the supply of sufficient metals.

Investors have invested a lot of money in start-ups that can develop promising new battery technologies. Utility companies that want to develop static power storage facilities are also considering so-called mobile batteries, which use recyclable materials such as vanadium.

After more than 20 years of development, vanadium current battery has become a mature energy storage technology. Its application direction is new energy electric field and MWh large energy storage power station of power grid. Lithium batteries are important for mobile power supplies. They are like spoons and shovels. They are irreplaceable. The important competitors of all vanadium liquid flow battery are large-scale energy storage technologies, such as hydraulic energy storage, compressed air energy storage and liquid flow battery of other systems.

Power companies will switch to mobile batteries, which store electricity in large, independent containers containing liquid electrolytes and pump them into the battery. The battery can use different raw materials, such as vanadium metal currently used in the steel industry.

The advantage of vanadium batteries is that they do not lose charge as quickly as lithium batteries (a process known as charge decay). Vanadium is also easy to recover.

Compared with lithium battery, vanadium flow battery has three important advantages:

First, convenience. A system can be as big as your refrigerator or the substation in your area. The electricity is enough for your family to use for a day to a year, so you can design it as you like.

2、 Long service life. You may need half a century

3. Good safety. There is no pressure in the face of large current and overcharge, which is a taboo for lithium batteries, and there will be no fire and explosion.

China dominates the production of vanadium, accounting for half of the global supply. With the increase in the number of battery manufacturers in China, most batteries are likely to be produced in China in the coming decades. According to the data of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, by 2028, half of the global battery production may be in China.