Fujitsu-backed FDK claims nickel zinc batteries ready for use in UPSes Japanese battery maker FDK reckons a major improvement in its Ni-Zn battery has proven its durability enough to deem it practical for use as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). The batteries, having made their debut in March, have undergone long-term testing to allegedly prove it maintains 70 percent capacity after 800 …
Well, sure, but a lead-acid battery weighs about 17 kg (thank you, Google!), so in a car weighing around 1500 kg, we're talking about 1.1% of the total weight -- so say you save half of that or 0.5% ... I'm not sure you'd ever notice it.
Now in an industrial lift-truck (forklift) where the lead-acid batteries weight something like 1500 kg, this will be more significant -- but then, in that application you generally want the battery to weigh more because it's also the ballast for the truck.
So perhaps stationary applications are best for this technology?
If it's the size of one of those gigantic fridges that are sold as "american style" in the UK, you'd probably need a fork lift truck to get it into place. I've got a 9.5kWh LiFe battery at home, as storage for my solar panels. It's less than half the size of an "under counter" fridge, but it's a 2 person job to move it.... Double the size and you'll need lifting equipment of some sort. (I know some people have their battery in their loft space, and I have no idea how you'd safely get a battery like mine into a loft....)
If you have a tiny house you won't need a battery designed to power a regular sized house. Or you can spend more for a more compact model. For the fast majority of the market, taking an extra cubic meter or two in a corner of the basement or garage is not a problem.
700 charge/discharge cycles doesn't sound great for a home battery - a lifetime of 2 years.
The ones I have (Pylontech US3000C) are rated for 6000 cycles. Unless these ones are 10 times cheaper, it doesn't make much sense.
A UPS, which stays charged most of the time and is rarely cycled, is a different matter.
You're talking about a home battery for someone with solar panels so they are being charged and discharged daily. Most people are connected to utility power and will remain connected even if they get solar panels because you need some seriously oversized batteries if you want enough storage to allow you to survive a week of rainy weather, or in colder climates snow covering your panels for a month.
You're also ignoring what those cycle ratings mean. That's usually quoted as a full charge/discharge cycle (not necessarily from 0 to 100% which is bad for a lot of battery types, usually more than 5 to 95 or 10 to 90) to reach 80% of its rated capacity. If you buy a battery with 2x your daily usage (because you are going to have high usage days once in a while) then it could get down to 60% or so before it becomes a problem. That would mean that not only are you only using a half cycle per day on average, putting you at 1400 days, but using it until 60% of its rated capacity increases that again. Maybe it doubles again to 2800 days. That would last into the next decade, and there will probably be way better technology available then.
I would rather spend as little as possible and get something I had to replace in 6 to 8 years than spend a lot more for something that supposedly will last 20 (will the company that sold you the 6000 cycle battery be around if it dies after only 1500?) because I know I'll be able to replace it with something WAY better and way cheaper in 6 to 8 years.
"You're also ignoring what those cycle ratings mean. "
Speaking of this, discharging lead acid below 80% causes a prodigious loss of capacity/cycle life and taking them below 20% essentially kills them
This is why lead-acid backed UPSes are primarily intended to be used for as long as it takes to cleanly shut down the load and why systems intended to handle deep discharge (think: Telephone exchanges) use INSANELY overspecced lead-acid battery banks (or did when I was topping them off/checking specific gravity)
Well for one thing, in my little MX-5 which weighs less than a ton, dropping 7 KG would be a huge reduction :p. It's also the sort of thing where as a driver you wouldn't notice, but if deployed to the global fleet it would save huge amounts of gas.
The other thing is that in most cars, the battery is up front and takes up a large section of the engine bay. Thus, making it smaller and lighter would improve weight distribution, and allow car designers more freedom in packaging (possibly leading to more legroom).
You can charge them below that but you have to do it at a reduced rate.
Almost all decent LiFePO4 batteries have a BMS which will refuse charging at too high a current at too low a temperature.
Some even include warmers to warm the batteries in low temperatures when on charge.
And all the solar-controller-chargers, etc. are aware and compensate for charging in such temperatures.
It's not that they can't be charged, it's that there's a limit to how fast you can charge them below zero. Which wouldn't be an issue after a few minutes of driving.
However, they store power far better than lead-acids and their voltage is linear to their charge, so you know exactly how much battery you have left.
They're used in marine applications all the time.
A starter battery is a special configuration -- very high current for a very short time, then recharged. The FDK claim is that these are suitable as deep-discharge batteries, which is a different kind of configuration -- run the UPS for as long as you can, supplying just the power that is labeled on the box.
the Ni-Zn batteries were lighter with lower environmental impact than the lead-acid alternatives traditionally used in UPSes.
Quite the claim considering that lead-acid batteries (at least those used in cars) are basically a closed-loop and exceptionally low impact. More than 99% of the materials in a lead-acid car battery can be recycled, and if you buy a new one, it will usually be made of 100% recycled materials. Unless there's something different about the lead-acid units in UPS?
I suppose if you double the energy density, then a given application only requires half as much battery by weight, which would give you a lower impact - so long as they can be appropriately recycled at EOL and are drawing from recycled materials to start with.
I wouldn't want to be working in a recycling plant dealing with lead (or, indeed, concentrated sulphuric acid with nasty lead compounds sloshing around in it). The thing about nickel and zinc is, that they're not going to give you heavy-metal poisoning if you accidentally ingest them or breathe them in, in dust form (although apparently breathing in nickel dust, as may occur in a refinery setting, is a suspected carcinogen).
Recycling is never a completely closed loop, and anywhere dealing with recycling lead from batteries is going to end up contaminated.
(although apparently breathing in nickel dust, as may occur in a refinery setting, is a suspected carcinogen).
I can't imagine breathing in any form of metal dust is going to do good things for you. Some are worse than others, but generally HSE/OSHA rules would mandate proper filtration and/or breathing apparatus.
Admittedly there's a whole separate section of health & safety known as CLAW (Control of Lead At Work), but this is something that - for instance - the entire target shooting community manage to implement safely even for volunteer-run membership clubs. Good hygiene, extraction, get specialists in to empty the butts. People shoot all their lives and don't get lead poisoning.
I wouldn't want to be working in a recycling plant dealing with lead (or, indeed, concentrated sulphuric acid with nasty lead compounds sloshing around in it). The thing about nickel and zinc is, that they're not going to give you heavy-metal poisoning
I guess the question is... what solutions and materials do they use to recycle nickel and zinc? Are they present in an elemental form in the battery and easily recycled, or do you need to dissolve them in a nasty solution to separate them out for processing? What happens to that solution afterwards? What are the byproducts of the recycling process? Or can they be reprocessed as their existing alloys? What about if they have dendritic growth on them? Does that need dissolving off?
The thing with lead acid batteries, is they're very easy to reprocess. They feed them into a hammer mill, smash them up and dump them into a pool of water. The plastic floats off and is ground into pellets and used as fresh stock. The lead is scraped off the bottom and cast into ingots for reuse. The liquids are fed into a tank where they either reclaim the acid for reuse, or they dump something else in to neutralise it. I recall reading somewhere they can actually turn it into a household cleaning agent of some sort in one step. At the end, you don't have any waste byproducts, leftover catalysts or or other waste. Is the same true of trying to separate nickel/zinc alloys? (Genuine question).
No system is truly closed-cycle, but lead-acid batteries is about as close as you can get.
Typical car batteries are "flooded" while typical ups batteries are some kind of sealed lead acid like AGM. AGM basically just has some fibreglass matting between the plates which probably makes them slightly harder to recycle. Can't imagine that making much difference overall though.
I'd guess the biggest environmental advantage is simply the longer lifespan and lighter weight means far less pollution is created by servicing or transporting them.
Of course the big question is the recycling. Lead acid may be far from perfect but as you say, the recycling of it is already a solved problem. Adding more and more different types of battery will likely just lead to less and less recycling and what recycling there is will have a higher environmental impact because of the need to sort the different types of battery.
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