Batteries produced from iron and salt in ceramic tubes pose much less fireplace danger than lithium-ion batteries
Inlyte Vitality
A battery manufactured from iron and salt might present emergency energy – with out the specter of fireplace – close to considered one of California’s oldest redwood forests.
The 200-kilowatt battery might be paired with photo voltaic panels on the Alliance Redwoods Convention Grounds in Sonoma County, California. This facility is in a excessive wildfire danger zone in a redwood forest, and it’s solely 16 kilometres from the Armstrong Redwoods State Pure Reserve, dwelling to a few of California’s tallest and oldest bushes. Throughout excessive climate and wildfires, firefighters and evacuees depend on the convention website, 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 protected, ample, low-cost power storage system,” says Ben Kaun at Inlyte Vitality in California. “And that led us to very massive cells with a really low-cost and ample lively materials, iron and salt.”
The battery undertaking might ship as much as two weeks of emergency backup energy as soon as it turns into operational in 2027. That might maintain the lights on within the convention grounds and likewise 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 kind of fireplace and explosion danger, which is a foremost difficulty with packing tons of lithium-ion batteries shut collectively,” says Kaun.
The lithium-ion batteries in smartphones or electrical vehicles generally catch fireplace, and this danger might be magnified when many batteries are clustered collectively in massive 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 danger. The iron-salt battery undertaking acquired 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 look like a wise alternative for undertaking builders trying to put power storage methods 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 provide a technique to keep away from a few of that danger.”
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