Germany EVONIK Industrial Co., Ltd. said that it will jointly develop with Daimler Automotive and some R&D institutions the world's largest lithium-battery battery with the largest electricity storage capacity, so that wind power and solar power generation can realize large-capacity, low-cost storage in the future.
The company said that the battery for power plants to be developed is based on a polymer lithium-ion battery technology that combines the ceramic storage technology that the company currently designs for electric vehicles. This technology is characterized by good safety, small size and high cycle stability.
As a first step in the R&D project, the company plans to build a power storage device with a power of one megawatt in a power station in Saarland, western Germany. The required battery storage capacity is about 700 kWh. The volume is only 40 to 50 times that of batteries for electric or hybrid cars. In theory, if this power storage device is charged and discharged once every 15 minutes, it can guarantee the power supply to 4000 households every year.
Klaus Engel, chairman of EVONIK, said that once the new battery is successfully developed, it will be able to solve the problem of power supply fluctuations caused by the introduction of wind power and solar power to the grid. Industry experts pointed out that Germany alone plans to increase renewable energy production to half of total generation by 2050, and other EU countries will import more and more wind and solar power into the grid. This places ever-increasing demands on the storage and transmission technology of renewable energy power generation. Experts predict that the advanced storage devices in the future will be a huge market of billions of euros per year.