I'll be honest, I didn't dream of Iron Chromium Redox flow battery in my dreams, nor did I have any secret information from NASA. I did what any other 22 year old would, ask Gemini about it. If you ask Gemini or ChatGPT about VRFBs, there are high chances that it will suggest alternate chemistries also.
Now that can be a good thing or a bad thing. If you know a little bit electrochemistry, it would spit out a very obvious answer. If you don't, you'll go down the same rabbit hole I did. AI doesn't know your intentions. So it acts as the most efficient information summarizer, and that's great, if you just want information, not if you want action.
So one of the first alternatives to VRFBs Gemini suggested was Iron - Chromium, and it made a lot of sense because Iron and Chromium are commodity metals, Iron is literally the most mined metal on earth and chromium comes third [source]. Their commodity prices are -
- Iron - $110 per ton (at the time of writing)
- Chromium - $300 per ton (at the time of writing)
Remember
Vanadium prices ? $ 4 /pound or $10,000 per ton. Instead 1 ton of Vanadium I can buy 90 tons of iron ore and 30 tones of chromite ore, or 25 tons of each together, and these are commodity prices, not refined chemicals, which tend to get more expensive after purifying.
So I spent the next 20 days becoming the most obsessive user of Gemini. Not the most, technically sound one, the most obsessive, excited one, because apparently I had found a gold mine, or so i thought, because Gemini kept saying that there are 3 big hurdles to commercialization of Iron - Chromium batteries -
- Hydrogen Evolution Reaction
- Chromium chemical kinetics
- Battery operating temperature is 65°C
The funny thing is Gemini being the cheerleader and problem solver it is ; kept solving these problems, elegantly. For 20 days I was over confident that i was going to be the next Musk 😂😂. On the 21st day, I was studying for my thermodynamics paper, when I saw a physics equation every high school physics student knows -
Put simply, the heavier you are, the more energy it takes for your body to warm up. To tell you why that is a problem let's take and example-
In one of my
previous posts, I listed the energy density of the Iron Chromium battery, 15Wh/L, that means if you want to make a 150 kWh battery, you need 1000 liters of electrolyte, that is water plus heavy metal salts, this will weigh more than 1 metric ton. So if you want to operate the battery at its normal capacity, you will have to increase the temperature of more than 1 ton of chemical water from 298 K (25°C) to 338 K (65°C), that's a lot of heat, not available naturally , anywhere. So now you have to spend extra energy just to operate the battery normally.
That's a problem, you can't ask anyone to let heat the battery first, waste their electricity, and then start charging. Certainly not electricity grid operators.
So I did the obvious, asked Gemini for an alternate chemistry. All Iron Hybrid Redox Flow Batteries and that is the topic for my next post.
None of this is AI generated, so feel free to fact check me and looking forward to your views and help.
Mayank Jately
If you want to follow this blog
Comments
Post a Comment