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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BAoBaB (Blue Acid/Base Battery: Storage and recovery of renewable electrical energy by reversible salt water dissociation)

Teaser

Summary

The need of electric energy storage for our society has drastically increased in the last years. New technological solutions must be developed, in order to provide a safe and sustainable availability of electric energy.
The BAoBaB project (Blue Acid/Base Battery) aims to develop a new, environment-friendly, and cost-competitive battery for stationary electrical energy storage, and to apply this system in the existing electricity grid.
Our technology is based on energy storage via a bipolar electrodialysis system, where electric energy can be stored by using special membranes able to generate acid and base solutions.
In this way, electric energy can be stored by using only salt and water, thus providing a cost-effective and safe energy storage system.

Specific objectives of the BAoBaB project are:
1) to establish and extend the potential of BAoBaB to become a reliable energy storage technology at kWh-MWh scale for application at user premises or at substation level.
2) to understand and enhance mass transfer in round-trip conversion techniques and hence to improve the energy conversion efficiencies of the BAoBaB system.
3) to validate under accepted utility use conditions an automatically operated BAoBaB system at a scale of 1 kW power and 7 kWh energy storage.
4) to pave the road for cost competitive energy storage with attention to life-cycle cost and performance. The aimed potential levelized cost is <0.05 â‚¬/kWh/cycle, which would be an economically scalable EES without subsidies.

Work performed

The BAoBaB project started in May 2017. In the first 18 months of the project, all the partners contributed to the development of new components and the feasibility assessment of the BAoBaB technology. In particular, Wetsus, AquaBattery and University of Palermo are actively involved in laboratory and modeling activities, in order to identify new osmotic solutions and enhance the battery performance. Fujifilm is currently developing new monopolar and bipolar membranes, which will be optimized for the BAoBaB operational conditions (e.g., concentrated acid and base solutions). AquaBattery is currently building the first BAoBaB pilot plant, which will be able to deliver a peak power of 1 kW and a total energy storage capacity of 25 kWh. The construction of the plant is currently ongoing, and it will be installed and tested in real environments in 2019.

Final results

The BAoBaB storage technology is a complete new concept and location independent, thus it will enlarge the portfolio of available energy storage systems. The scalability of this technology, including affordable small systems, allows to use the BAoBaB in a wide range of capacities and for different purposes. In particular, thanks to cheap and widely available storage solutions (water and salt), the BAoBaB system can be applied for kWh- to MWh-scale systems.
The cost per storage capacity for BAoBaB is expected to be lower than for chemical storage, since no expensive material is used (i.e., water and salt instead of rare metals or chemicals), thus minimizing the environmental impact. Moreover, the BAoBaB system has also potentially lower costs compared to mechanical electric storage systems (e.g., PHS, or Compressed Air Energy Storage), since no high-pressure equipment are needed, ), and higher performance.