New battery for rail, marine, mining, communications and energy sectors

With world demand for batteries of all types forecast to reach a value of $132 billion by 2016, there is always going to be an opening for new types. Now GE is developing a longer lasting and more durable battery that charges more quickly and could contribute to raising the efficiencies of solar and wind power.

The device is based on sodium and nickel and a factory, employing 450 people, has been opened in Schenectady in New York. GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, believes electricity costs will fall because the new battery will allow utilities to use different technologies more efficiently.

The plant will pump out ecomagination-qualified Durathon battery products, which can last up to 10 times longer than conventional lead acid batteries and store more energy in half the space. The Durathon is the result of a $100 million investment in battery technology developed at GE Global Research in nearby Niskayuna, NY.

The plant is part of GE’s new energy storage business, which is marketing Durathons to the rail, marine, mining, communications and energy sectors as a reliable source of continuous distributed power.

Durathon batteries are high energy-density sodium-metal-halide cells that are ecomagination-qualified because they are made using abundantly available materials like saline and water, providing increased efficiency and reliability for users and decreasing the greenhouse gases emitted by the generators that charge them. They have been rated to last up to two decades, need little maintenance and can be remotely monitored.

The battery uses a ceramic electrolyte that separates the electrodes. During charging, chloride ions from sodium chloride react with nickel to form nickel chloride. The sodium ions left behind move through the electrolyte into a reservoir.

As the battery produces power, ions move back through the electrolyte and the reaction taking place inside an insulated container is reversed.

A South African company, Megatron Federal, will be one of the first organisations to use these batteries when it adopts them to power mobile phone towers in Nigeria, replacing diesel generators. The company says pairing the generators with the batteries will give some quite dramatic savings - 53% on fuel, 45% on maintenance and about 60% on generator replacement. Emissions, too, will be down, leading to an overall saving of more than a million dollars per tower over 20 years.

The batteries will give two main advantages over the traditional lead-acid types - there will be a shorter charging time of around two hours compared with 10 hours for the lead-acid and no air conditioning will be required for the sodium and nickel batteries.

And because the battery can easily store from wind and solar power panels, it can even out fluctuations in these energy sources, particularly when used in microgrids.

The downside of the GE development is that the batteries are more expensive per kilowatt hour. However, they would have a longer life. Where lead-acid batteries are regularly discharged, they have a life of only about six months. By contrast, the GE development could last 10 years or more of daily charging. In fact, the design allows for deep discharges of at least 3500 times.

The development history of these new devices was brought about by the oil crisis of the 1980s where they were designed for transport applications in South Africa. At one stage the batteries powered a Mercedes vehicle but then the oil price dropped and interest in alternative power sources faded.