A non-flammable battery for a safer, carbon-free future
Lithium-ion batteries are the workhorses of home electronics and are driving an electric revolution in the transportation sector. But they are not suitable for every application.
A major drawback is their flammability and toxicity, making large-scale lithium-ion energy storage a poor fit in densely populated city centers and near metal processing or chemical plants.
Now Alsym Energy has developed a non-flammable, non-toxic alternative to lithium-ion batteries to help renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power bridge the gap in a wider range of sectors. The company’s electrodes use relatively stable, abundant materials, and the electrolyte consists mainly of water with some non-toxic additives.
“Renewable energy sources are only available intermittently, so you need storage. To really solve the CO2 reduction problem, we need to be able to make these batteries everywhere at low cost,” said Kripa Varanasi, co-founder of Alsym and MIT professor.
The company believes its batteries, which are currently being tested by potential customers around the world, have huge potential to decarbonise the high-emission industrial manufacturing sector, and they see other applications ranging from mining to powering data centres, homes and utilities.
“We are enabling a low-carbon market that was not possible before,” said Mukesh Chatter, co-founder and CEO of Alsym. “No chemical or steel plant would dare put a lithium battery near their premises due to its flammability, and industrial emissions are a much bigger problem than passenger cars. With this approach we can offer a new path.”
Helping 1 billion people
Chatter started a telecommunications company in 1997 with serial entrepreneurs and longtime MIT community members Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58, and Alec Dingee ’52. Since the company was acquired in 1999, Chatter and his wife have started other ventures and invested in some startups, but after losing his mother to cancer in 2012, Chatter decided he wanted to maximize his impact by working solely on technologies that could reach $1 billion. people or more could reach.
The problem Chatter decided to focus on was access to electricity.
“The intention was to light the homes of at least 1 billion people around the world who either had no electricity, or who had it only some of the time, effectively condemning them to a life of poverty in the 19th century,” Chatter says. . “If you don’t have access to electricity, you don’t have internet, cell phones, education, etc.”
To solve the problem, Chatter decided to fund research into a new type of battery. The battery had to be cheap enough to be used in resource-poor environments, safe enough to be deployed in crowded areas, and work well enough to support two light bulbs, a fan, a refrigerator, and an Internet modem.
At first, Chatter was surprised at how few candidates he had to begin the research, even from researchers at the best universities in the world.
“It’s a burning issue, but the risk of failure was so high that no one wanted to take the risk,” Chatter recalls.
Ultimately, he found his partners in Varanasi, professor Nikhil Koratkar of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rensselaer researcher Rahul Mukherjee. Varanasi, who notes that he has been at MIT for 22 years, says the institute’s culture gave him the confidence to tackle big problems.
“My students, postdocs and colleagues are inspiring to me,” he says. “The MIT ecosystem imbues us with this determination to tackle problems that seem insurmountable.”
Varanasi heads an interdisciplinary laboratory at MIT dedicated to understanding physicochemical and biological phenomena. His research has led to the creation of materials, devices, products and processes to address challenges in the energy, agriculture and other sectors, as well as start-up companies to commercialize this work.
“Working at the boundaries of matter has opened up countless new avenues of research in various fields, and MIT has given me the creative freedom to explore, discover and learn, and apply that knowledge to solve critical challenges,” he says . “I was able to benefit significantly from my lessons as we started developing the new battery technology.”
Alsym’s founding team set out to design an entirely new battery based on new materials that could meet the parameters defined by Chatter. To make it non-flammable and non-toxic, the founders wanted to avoid lithium and cobalt.
After evaluating many different chemistries, the founders arrived at Alsym’s current approach, which was completed in 2020.
While the full composition of Alsym’s battery is still under wraps as the company awaits patents, one of Alsym’s electrodes is made mostly of manganese oxide, while the other is made mostly of a metal oxide. The electrolyte is mainly water.
There are several advantages to Alsym’s new battery chemistry. Because the battery is inherently safer and more durable than lithium-ion, the company does not require the same safety features or cooling equipment and can place the batteries close together without fear of fire or explosion. Varanasi also says the battery can be produced in any modern lithium-ion factory with minimal modifications and at significantly lower operating costs.
“We’re really excited right now,” Chatter said. “We first wanted to light the homes of 1 billion people, and now, in addition to the original goal, we have the opportunity to impact the entire world if we succeed in reducing industrial emissions.”
A new energy storage platform
Although the batteries don’t quite reach the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, Varanasi says Alsym is the first among alternative chemistries at the system level. He says 20-foot containers with Alsym batteries can provide 1.7 megawatt hours of electricity. The batteries can also be quickly charged in four hours and can be configured to discharge for anywhere from two to 110 hours.
“We’re very configurable, and that’s important because depending on where you are, with solar you can sometimes get two cycles a day, and when combined with wind you can really get electricity 24/7,” Chatter says. “The need for multi-day or long-term storage is a small part of the market, but we support that too.”
Alsym has been producing prototypes at a small factory in Woburn, Massachusetts, for the past two years, and early this year it expanded its capacity and began sending samples to customers for field testing.
In addition to major utilities, the company works with municipalities, generator manufacturers and suppliers of behind-the-meter power for residential and commercial buildings. The company is also in talks with major chemical manufacturers and metal processing plants to provide an energy storage system to reduce their carbon footprint, something they said was not feasible with lithium-ion batteries due to their flammability, or with non-lithium batteries due to their flammability. their large space requirements.
Another crucial area is data centers. With the growth of AI, the demand for data centers – and their energy consumption – will increase.
“We must drive the AI and digitalization revolution without endangering our planet,” says Varanasi, adding that lithium batteries are not suitable for co-location with data centers due to flammability risks. “Alsym batteries are well positioned to provide a safer, more sustainable alternative. Intermittency is also a key issue for electrolyzers used in green hydrogen production and other markets.”
Varanasi views Alsym as a platform company, and Chatter says Alsym is already working on other battery chemistries that have higher density and maintain performance at even more extreme temperatures.
“If you use one material in a battery, and the whole world starts using it, then you run out of material,” Varanasi says. “What we have is a platform that has allowed us to come up with not just one chemistry, but at least three or four chemistries aimed at different applications so that no specific set of materials comes under pressure in terms of offer.”
