Na 4 B, LLC — National Science Foundation SBIR Phase II: NM

Description

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will be to stabilize and support a more robust and diverse power grid. The goal is to countervail today's stress on the grid, caused by rapidly growing electric power demand and the integration of renewable power sources. In this project, a distributed energy storage system will be developed that is robust, scalable, deployable, and price competitive. The storage system will help to improve the power quality, avoid widespread power outages, integrate renewable energy, and improve the utilization of existing grid assets. This storage system will allow utilities and system operators to reduce investments into the existing grid while simultaneously improving the service for their customers. The grid-scaled distributed energy storage market is an emerging market that is projected to growly rapidly in the coming years according to numerous studies. Among all the different storage technologies, batteries have the scalability, calendar life, cycle life, response time and low maintenance costs most suitable to the needs of distributed, power-grid-integrated energy storage. The technical objectives of this Phase II research project are to produce a significantly improved version of the existing sodium metal chloride battery and demonstrate a 4 kWh battery system. Sodium batteries were identified by Sandia National Laboratory as providing the highest technical and economic development potential for grid-scaled distributed energy storage. The main barriers to their wide-spread implementation are their considerably high production cost, their high operating temperature, and their long charge/discharge time. Na4B has developed a new electrolyte to vastly improve the ion transport and to overcome the technical limitations inherent in the existing technology. The electrolyte design, developed in this project, shows superior ion conductivity and is a basis for a prismatic sodium metal chloride electrochemical cell. These achievements allow for the production of a new generation of sodium batteries with greatly improved performance, at a much lower cost.