ESS Iron Flow Grid Sized Battery Backup

Australia is going for it

“examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good” 1 Thessalonians 5:21

I’ve been keeping an eye on ESS Tech Inc. The ticker is GWH (don’t ask me why). I bought a few shares and signed up for their newsletter, with some excerpts for you today, to keep it on my radar. They’re making grid scale container size iron flow battery systems that use iron, salt, and water. I think they’re still too expensive to get much traction, but they have the considerable advantage of not bursting into flames or exploding, not needing all kinds of toxic mining for source materials, and not being hard to recycle. So far, the disadvantages, besides high initial cost and high delivery and installation cost, is high maintenance. The systems weigh about 84,000 lbs and involve lots of pipes and pumps and valves which are needed to keep the ‘iron flow’ flowing. In my opinion, these disadvantages of cost will prevent any long term prevalence of growth for grid backup. But in the short term, maybe 3-5 years, and also depending on who wins the election**, iron flow systems might do well. **Harris will keep the need for grid backup going; Trump will make it unnecessary as he slows or stops the growth of renewables subsidies

from pv magazine:

“The [ESS] product’s pump and motor drives have an expected lifetime of 19-22 years. The industrial computer, which was described as “inexpensive,” can be expected to be replaced every 5-7 years. ESS offers an O&M service contract after the 10-year mark.

But even more striking is the battery’s expected longevity. Much like the grid’s oldest assets, (some of which were first built in the 1890s), ESS batteries show the potential to soldier on for many decades. While the ESS battery systems have a prescribed design life of 25 years, the battery modules, electrolyte, plumbing, and other components may well last for decades longer with proper maintenance.”

news release from Energy Storage Systems (ESS Inc.):

“ESS' Australian partner, Energy Storage Industries – Asia Pacific (ESI), has received an investment of AU$25 million (~US$17 million) from the Queensland Government and raised a further AU$40 million (~US$23 million) in private capital to accelerate the clean energy transition in Australia and Oceania. With the new investment, ESI will continue construction on a manufacturing facility in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia at which it will assemble long-duration iron flow battery systems. Demand for ESS’ technology is growing across Australia. To meet this demand, ESI has targeted an annual system production capacity of 400MW per year by 2029 using ESS technology.  As more renewables are added to the grid and periods of localized grid congestion increase, negative energy prices* will become an enduring challenge for generators and utilities. New battery technologies can help. With long design-life, operational flexibility and unlimited cycling, projects powered by ESS IFB technology can capitalize on negative pricing and offer attractive returns compared to lithium-ion technology in affected regions.”

* negative energy prices, refers to wholesale prices that utilities will pay companies that produce power, are caused by intermittent peaking power during midday by solar and during windy periods from wind turbines. Negative prices badly hurt the power generators that we need the most - coal, gas, and nuclear - and are a major cause of many of them shutting down, leaving our grid system that much more vulnerable. ESS is saying that wind and solar can theoretically become more profitable by using battery storage during peak power production instead of selling at a loss, and then releasing and selling the stored energy at a better price time. However, I would question whether it’s more profitable when you factor in the extra capital expense of adding the backup batteries.

Jael Holzman • interviewed ESS CEO Sept.18 ‘24:

“It’s not so much an opinion as just reporting the obvious, which is that lithium-ion batteries on the grid have a buy-in problem. Maybe if you’re in rural western Australia nobody cares because there are no human beings around, but if you look at the need for energy storage to facilitate the energy transition, it’s pretty clear we have to put batteries all over the place and specifically close to where human beings live. And that’s a problem. Can iron-flow help solve that problem? I think unequivocally we can. It’s a very different architecture. It’s a battery that’s really designed from the beginning to operate as a grid backup battery. If you go back to look at lithium, it was never designed to go onto the grid. It was designed to go into camcorders, phones. This is not the technology I think anybody would’ve picked for the grid if they had started from scratch.”

“I’ll use Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam [as an example]. They said, we have thousands of gallons of jet fuel laying around. And people. And airplanes. We can’t put a lithium battery out here. So they’re using an iron-flow and sought out a non-lithium battery to solve their energy storage problems because it was safer.”

The Schiphol Airport obviously is concerned about the risk of lithium battery fires. Thomas Shepstone did a Guest Post from David Wojick of CFact on Oct.2 ‘24 about the possible threat of grid scale lithium battery fires. I’m not sure how serious this threat is, since we don’t have any incidents that I know of so far, but if any lithium container fires do flare up, ESS Inc’s iron flow batteries will suddenly become in demand. We’ll just have to wait and see…