Aquion, the Advanced Battery Startup Funded by Bill Gates and Kleiner Perkins, declares Bankruptcy.
Aquion’s saltwater battery was a safe fully recyclable energy storage battery that unfortunately was not able to live up to the expected results in the field that it was able to achieve in the factory testing.
This leaves the SoNick or Sodium Nickel Chloride batteries as the only safe fully recyclable energy storage battery currently available. SoNick batteries have been in production since 2003 and are already being used in many commercial applications and usage figures are coming from real life results rather than hoped for results from laboratory conditions. FIAMM as a company have been in operation since 1942 so are already a well-established company.
In a market where lithium ion batteries, which currently dominate the market, are coming under more and more scrutiny due to their safety concerns, safe energy storage technologies like the Aquion saltwater battery and the SoNick heated salt battery are being considered by more and more people who recognise the problems with the thermal runaway issues with lithium.
The media continuously promotes wonderful new energy storage batteries that promise long runtimes, charge in minutes, are paper-thin and will perform miracles. While these experimental batteries produce a voltage, the downsides are seldom mentioned. The typical shortcomings are low load capacity and short cycle life.
There is much media hype, and this may be done in part to attract venture capitalists to fund research projects. Few products have incubation periods that last as long as a battery. Although glamorous and promising at first, especially if the battery promises to power the electric vehicle, investment firms are beginning to realize the high development costs, uncertainties and long gestation periods before a return can be realized. Meanwhile, universities continue publishing papers about battery breakthroughs to keep receiving government funding while private companies throw in a paper or two to appease investors and boost their own stock value.
There will always be new technology emerging but it is important to realise that just because a new technology may be a good one, doesn’t mean it will be able to become commercially viable. There are many companies with excellent products that have closed down and left customers with no back-up.
This is particularly true with the battery energy storage industry where lithium ion technology is being pushed without any regard to the safety issues inherent with lithium ion or the difficulty in recycling the toxic lithium ion used in the batteries.
If you are seriously considering energy storage batteries (which you definitely should be) to provide your own energy security in the ever more challenging times of energy reliability you should consider technology that has already been tested in the field and is able to prove its claims.
If you would like to know more about protecting yourself with your own energystorage by getting safe, reliable, recyclable, SoNick (heated salt) battery storage for your own home, business or micro-grid application visit us at https://gridedge.au