Brief analysis of lead-carbon battery, lithium ion battery, flow battery, and sodium-sulfur battery

At present, the more mature main energy storage batteries are: lead-carbon batteries, lithium batteries, flow batteries, sodium-sulfur batteries, and so on. Various battery technical characteristics have their own advantages, we briefly introduce the characteristics of various types of energy storage batteries.

The rapid development of the lithium battery industry and the decline in costs are driving energy storage applications. The industry scale of the lithium battery cells for sale exceeds 200 billion yuan, and it will maintain rapid growth in the future. In the past three years, the cost of lithium batteries has dropped by more than 50%. At present, the production capacity of mainstream lithium battery manufacturers is still expanding at a high speed. With the advancement of electrode technology and the use of power batteries, it is expected that the cost of lithium batteries will remain a 15-20% annual decline in the next 5 years. Lithium batteries are the mainstream of electrochemical energy storage batteries. Lithium batteries of hybrid energy storage systems have technical and economic advantages in various application fields. At present, the installed scale of related projects around the world accounts for about 50% of the total capacity, far exceeding other energy storage technologies. Energy storage applications pay more attention to safety, cycle life and cost. The current lithium iron phosphate and lithium titanate technologies are more suitable. In the future, advanced anode technology and electrolyte technology will become the key to improve cycle life.

Lead-carbon battery is a capacitor type lead-acid battery. It is a technology evolved from the traditional lead-acid battery. It adds activated carbon to the negative electrode of the lead-acid battery, which can significantly improve the life of the lead-acid battery. Lead-carbon batteries have significant cost performance advantages, and the market prospects have been optimistic. Lead-carbon battery discharge power is 3-4 times that of lead-acid batteries, cycle life is increased to 6 times, and charging speed can be increased 8 times, and its production cost is only 30-40% higher than ordinary lead-acid batteries, which is extremely cost-effective. At present, the lead-acid battery industry has formed a "raw material-production-application-recycling" recycling industry chain. Based on this, lead-carbon energy storage technology has been initially commercialized in many fields. The market prospect is promising, and the existing problems are still private. Environmental pollution caused by recycling, so when applied to large-scale energy storage, certain procedures can prevent problems caused by non-standard recycling.

There are many flow battery systems, and all vanadium and zinc bromine are the mainstream. The flow battery has good cycle performance, and its capacity and power can be independently adjusted, which is suitable for large-scale energy storage. There are many researches on the whole vanadium system in China, but the dependence of the diaphragm on imports leads to high costs. The cost of zinc bromine is relatively low, and the technology is still subject to foreign monopolies. Single flow batteries do not require a separator, which is a new direction for the development of flow batteries in the future.

Sodium-sulfur energy storage performance is good, it is difficult to promote domestic short-term. Sodium-sulfur batteries have mature applications abroad, but the core technology is monopolized by Japan and it is difficult to promote domestically in the short term. Due to its high operating temperature, there are also some hidden dangers in terms of safety.

Overall, lead-carbon batteries, lithium-ion batteries, and flow batteries are the three major development directions of new energy storage batteries. Among them, the cost of lithium batteries is relatively high, but the long life of lithium titanate batteries may become the best choice for return on investment in energy storage. Applications; and lead-carbon batteries may become the new mainstream technology choice for energy storage batteries due to their cost advantages.