Beyond Zero Emissions has an interview (podcast) with Mil Ovan of Firefly Energy on improving lead acid battery technology - Mil Ovan of Firefly Energy speaks about their microcell technology that improves traditional lead acid battery peformance parameters.

Scott Bilby: We're talking with Mil Ovan, senior vice-president of Firefly Energy, a company that has developed a carbon graphite foam grid technology that increases the performance of lead acid batteries and reduces the amount of lead used. The technology has the potential to improve a wide range of market segments including transportation, construction, computer back up systems, just to name a few and also with significant cost savings. Welcome to the show Mil.

Mil Ovan: Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Scott: It's a joy having you on the show. We're interested in the name 'Firefly' and where it came from.

Mil: What's interesting about Firefly is that as I was thinking about the attributes of the technology, what words would capture it the best. It turns out I looked through the entire Thesaurus looking for names starting from A to Z and the short story is my daughter who was very young got up at 3 o'clock and wanted a bottle, I couldn't sleep after feeding her and I picked up the thesaurus and the first thing I saw in 'F' was Firefly and I said, that's it; but I went through all the way to Z anyway to figure out if there wasn't one that was even better. But when you think of a firefly it's very captivating, very illuminating, obviously a great power to weight ratio and also with the tip, it's very green and what we're doing with this firefly technology is replacing the heavy, corrodible, very non-conductive, lead metal grid in a lead-acid battery with this light-weight high surface foam material that now allows batteries to run longer, last longer be lighter, smaller in volume and much more environmentally responsive with the reduction in the amount of lead used in lead acid batteries. ...

Scott: And on that topic it kind of reminds us of the origin of the work done into the batteries from caterpillar. Is that correct?

Mil: Yes, the technology was incubated there, and it's a kind of interesting story. How is it that the company that makes earth moving equipment for a living come up with the Holy Grail of battery technology? Well, it turns out that Caterpillar has long used lead-acid batteries in their earth movers and you can't imagine a more abusive environment for a battery than something that shakes violently and is used in temperature extremes and is used infrequently like a battery in a CAT bulldozer, but they decided around the 2000 timeframe that they were going to put the Caterpillar name on those lead-acid batteries that they had long sourced from their current supplier and when they did that customers started to complain. They said, 'Hey, what's with this Caterpillar ruggedness that we've come to know and expect. These lead-acid batteries are failing, how would you fix them?' And that same battery had been sourced before by Caterpillar, so the customers' expectation really got heightened when the CAT name was put on that.

So, they went back to their existing base of lead-acid battery suppliers and said, 'How would you fix these problems? The battery kernel…unintelligible 05.13... at an accelerated rate of heights…unintelligible 05.16... you let the battery sit uncharged it sulfates up and you can't get the battery to accept the charge. How would you solve those problems?'

Not surprisingly, the answers coming back to Caterpillar weren't very sufficient from the lead-acid battery company, because when you think about it the last major innovation in lead-acid batteries, and by the way this technology was created in 1859, the last major innovation was not having to add water to your battery. Well, that's a big yawn because that was twenty, thirty years ago. So, when they reached the limits about what they can do with a lead-acid battery with the lead grid in it, they got rid of their R & D teams and their sophisticated test equipment and they started to look at other chemistries like nickel metal hydride and lithium.

So, Caterpillar instead, having found those answers to be not sufficient, turned inward to their own research and development arm, and Caterpillar probably spends about $600, $700 million a year on research and development, and an enterprising materials scientist named Kurt Kelley was given the task of designing a better lead acid battery. The good news, as it turns out, was that he had never designed a battery before so therefore he wasn't constrained with conventional wisdom about what you should and should not do to a battery, and one of those things that according to battery company wisdom was you shouldn't add carbon to a battery. Well, Kurt, as a materials scientist, knew that there was a broad spectrum of carbons, and that the battery industry only tried one, and Kurt tried an entirely different kind of carbon. And that overcame, therefore, the limitations in terms of runtime life that was posed by those who used lead metal and lead-acid batteries. So, that's really the essence of the innovation and in May, 2003 the technology was spun out to my partner and I as well as the chief scientist, whose also co-founder, and Firefly was founded in May, 2003.

Matthew: Now, for our listeners, they're familiar with the battery when it comes to lead –acid batteries, the battery in their motor vehicle, in their car, and now obviously, initially you'll be selling into some other markets, we can talk about those in a second, but I'm just interested in knowing, comparing it to what's in a car, like a flooded wet cell battery of a certain density that can deliver a certain amount of power to run your car, like how much lead is in a Firefly battery versus the one in our car, and how much more power can you get out of a Firefly battery than the kind of battery that's in a car at the moment?

Mil: Sure, and that's an interconnected question. In Australia you probably don't face extreme colds, but in more northern climates, typically in the winter, your battery is double-sized to account for the big drop in capacity when the cold temperatures hit. So, depending on your geography, this could be a third to a quarter less in size than a classic lead-acid battery.

It all depends on the application. You know, today's lead-acid battery isn't asked to do much in a car application, but that's quickly changing. You look in Europe, the E.U. wants to implement very stringent CO2 reductions on automobiles, and if the car manufacturer doesn't meet those by a certain timeframe they're going to get penalised 90 euros per car as a result. So, there's a dramatic shift to what are called micro-hybrid vehicles whereby you pull up to a busy stop light in Paris, you push in the clutch, the engine goes off, you let your foot off the brake after the light changes and the engine comes on again. And that's already been seen to reduce the amount of fuel consumption and pollution significantly.

However, the problem is the normal lead-acid battery isn't used to being started that many moment your Firefly technology, nickel metal hydrides, or these new lithium ion batteries times, you know instead of starting once when you drive your car home from work, you might be starting the vehicle 20-30 times during that commute and that's a very punishing application, particularly since when you're at that stop you still want to have your accessories running, now that has to run off the battery as a result rather than off the alternator. So, the situation with cars is going to be significantly changing and your father's lead-acid battery isn't going to be suitable for these new vehicles that are soon to be coming to the world.

"Switch off Hazelwood. Switch off Coal. Switch on Renewables" is a day of fun, creative and inspiring direct community action at Hazelwood coal power station.

Coal burning power stations are one of the main contributers to climate change, and Hazelwood is one of the dirtiest in the industrialised world.

On Sunday September 13th, 2009 people from across Victoria, and Australia, will come together for a day of peaceful community mass civil disobedience to Switch off Hazelwood and Switch off Coal – we will be taking direct action for renewable energy.

The Economist has an article on a humble staple of the energy storage industry that may still have a future ahead of it - lead acid batteries - Lead-acid batteries: Recharged.

LEAD-ACID batteries seem to have been around for ever. They were invented in 1859 by Gaston Planté, a French physicist, and have done sterling work over the decades starting car engines and powering slow-moving vehicles such as fork-lift trucks and milk floats. Compared with the newer energy technologies that are now sweeping the world, however, it has to be admitted that they look old-fashioned and a bit frumpy. These days the catwalk is crowded with nickel-metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries, showing off their ability to pack a lot of energy into a small space and deliver a steady current over a long period. The fact that these modern batteries are also lighter (lead is, after all, one of the densest elements in the periodic table) has made them the first choices for powering truly serious electric vehicles, as opposed to the ones that potter about warehouses and suburban streets.

It is, nevertheless, a mistake to dismiss something just because it is old. Another way of looking at things is that lead-acid batteries are tried and trusted. They may just need a bit of pepping up. And that is what is now happening. Axion Power, a firm based near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has found that the ideal tonic is carbon.

A conventional lead-acid battery is a simple affair, made up of a series of cells each containing a positive electrode made of lead dioxide and a negative electrode of metallic lead. These are immersed in an electrolyte of dilute sulphuric acid. Car batteries tend to have thin electrode plates, which allows a lot of energy to be discharged quickly, but only for a short period of time. That is fine for turning a starter motor, but it is not so good for turning an electric motor intended to move a car any distance. Moreover, a lead-acid battery can be ruined if it is discharged completely, as many motorists discover to their cost when trying to start their car on an icy morning. Lead-acid batteries with thicker electrodes can tolerate such “deep” discharges better than those with thin ones, but only at the expense of making a heavy battery even heavier.

In Axion’s battery the negative electrode is replaced with one made from activated carbon, a material used in supercapacitors. Normal capacitors—those that power the flashguns in cameras for instance—can be charged and discharged rapidly, but cannot store much energy. Supercapacitors are meatier versions that are able to hold a reasonable amount of energy as well as taking it in and releasing it quickly. Some, indeed, are already used in tandem with the lithium-ion batteries in electric cars to boost acceleration and recapture energy during so-called “regenerative” braking. Axion’s plan, therefore, is to have the best of both worlds by building a lead-acid/carbon hybrid, or PbC.

The carbon in the hybrid, which is protected within a sandwich of other materials, is more effective than metallic lead at releasing and absorbing protons to and from the acid during charging and discharging. In tests, Axion says, its PbCs have withstood more than 1,600 charges and deep discharges before they failed, which is three times better than standard lead-acid batteries specifically designed for such deep cycles.

True, the hybrids are still heavy compared with lithium-ion batteries. “But not everyone needs or can afford an electric car that accelerates like a Tesla,” says Ed Buiel, Axion’s chief technical officer, referring to the fastest electric car yet to be put into production, which uses a huge pack of lithium-ion cells. And for those who do not require Tesla-like performance, this makes sense. The hybrids are durable and also cheap to make because, according to Dr Buiel, they can be produced on existing lead-acid production lines. A Tesla costs $109,000. Axion, by contrast, has converted a pickup truck to run on a pack of its hybrids for around $8,000. (It has a range of 70km or about 45 miles.) The company is also working with a number of other small engineering firms to convert other sorts of vehicles.

Lead-carbon batteries are different from other types of batteries because they combine the high energy density of a battery and the high specific power of a supercapacitor in a single low-cost device. The primary goals of lead-carbon research have been to extend the cycle lives of lead-acid batteries and increase their power. Basically, developers start with conventional lead-acid chemistry and add carbon components to the negative electrodes. While the carbon components do not change the basic electrochemistry, they increase specific power and reduce a chemical reaction called “sulfation” that occurs during charging cycles and is the principal reason ordinary lead-acid batteries fail. Over the last several years, lead-carbon researchers have followed three different development paths:

* Blending carbon additives into the lead sulfate paste that is used for negative electrodes;
* Developing split-electrodes where half of the negative electrode is lead and the other half is carbon; and
* Completely replacing the lead-based negative electrode with a carbon electrode assembly.

The DOE’s 2008 Peer Review for its Energy Storage Systems Research Program included a slide presentation from Sandia that summarized the results of its cycle-life tests on five different batteries including a deep-cycle lead-acid battery, two lead-acid batteries with carbon enhanced pastes, a split-electrode lead-carbon battery (the Ultrabattery) and an advanced lithium-ion (Li-FePO4) battery. While the tests performed by Sandia focused on smoothing power output from wind turbines and used a 10% depth of discharge from a 50% initial state of charge, which means more testing will be required before comprehensive comparisons are possible, the following graph highlights the magnitude of the cycle-life improvements that lead-carbon technologies offer today. ...

A 10-fold improvement in the performance of any technology is by definition highly disruptive. The fact that lead-carbon achieved these disruptive performance gains using cheap and plentiful raw materials that are readily available from domestic sources and easily recyclable for use in new batteries using existing infrastructure is an absolute game changer; particularly when the closest comparable technology is based on expensive imported raw materials that are not easily recyclable for use in new batteries using existing infrastructure.