Solid Oxide Iron-Air Battery for Long-Duration Energy Storage: A Study on Reduction Kinetics of Energy Storage Material Fe-ZrO2 Catalyzed by Ir Particles

Abstract

Long duration electricity storage (LDES) with 10+ hour cycle duration is an economically competitive option to accelerate the penetration of renewable energy into the utility market. Unfortunately, none of the available energy storage technologies can meet the LDES’ requirements for duration and cost. The benchmark Li-ion technology can only store and discharge up to 4-hour energy, beyond which it would be cost prohibitive. In this presentation, a new solid-oxide iron-air batteries (SOIABs) with energy-dense solid iron as the energy storage material is shown to have inherent advantages for LDES applications. The presentation will start with the working principle of the SOIAB, baseline performance and bottlenecks of this new technology. It will then show that with a small amount of IrO2 (or Ir during operation) catalyst added into the energy store “Fe-bed”, a lab-size (f1′′) SOIAB can achieve an energy density of 625 Wh/kg, 12.5-hour cycle duration and 90% of round-trip efficiency under LDES-related working conditions. Given the excellent low-rate performance and the use of earth-abundant, low-cost Fe as the energy storage material, we finally conclude that SOIAB is a well-suited battery technology for LDES applications.