Batteries constituted of iron and salt in ceramic tubes pose much less fireplace threat than lithium-ion batteries
Inlyte Vitality
A battery fabricated from iron and salt might present emergency energy – with out the specter of fireplace – close to certainly one of California’s oldest redwood forests.
The 200-kilowatt battery shall be paired with photo voltaic panels on the Alliance Redwoods Convention Grounds in Sonoma County, California. This facility is in a excessive wildfire threat zone in a redwood forest, and it’s solely 16 kilometres from the Armstrong Redwoods State Pure Reserve, residence to a few of California’s tallest and oldest timber. Throughout excessive climate and wildfires, firefighters and evacuees depend on the convention web site, nevertheless it’s additionally susceptible to electrical energy grid outages.
“The best way we seemed on the know-how is, how might we make a secure, considerable, low-cost power storage system,” says Ben Kaun at Inlyte Vitality in California. “And that led us to very giant cells with a really low cost and considerable lively materials, iron and salt.”
The battery venture might ship as much as two weeks of emergency backup energy as soon as it turns into operational in 2027. That would preserve the lights on within the convention grounds and in addition provide power to a firefighting water-pump station close by – with out placing the long-lasting redwoods in danger.
That’s as a result of these easily-sourced battery supplies – powdered iron and salt contained in a ceramic tube – are additionally non-flammable. “We are able to put these batteries and battery cells fairly shut collectively with none type of fireplace and explosion threat, which is a principal problem with packing tons of lithium-ion batteries shut collectively,” says Kaun.
The lithium-ion batteries in smartphones or electrical automobiles generally catch fireplace, and this threat will be magnified when many batteries are clustered collectively in giant energy-storage crops. In January 2025, for instance, a fireplace on the world’s largest battery storage facility in California destroyed 300 megawatts of power storage. By comparability, Inlyte’s iron-salt batteries might retailer power with a lot decrease threat. The iron-salt battery venture obtained simply over $4 million in funding from the US Division of Vitality to enhance power resilience within the wildfire-prone area close to the redwood forest.
“These non-flammable batteries appear to be a sensible alternative for venture builders trying to put power storage programs in any distant or arid locations or close to forests topic to periodic drought,” says Dustin Mulvaney at San Jose State College in California. “Vitality applied sciences and infrastructure have an extended historical past of beginning wildfires, and non-flammable batteries supply a solution to keep away from a few of that threat.”
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