Liquid metal battery inventor questions lithium-ion as grid-scale storage solution

Liquid metal battery inventor Professor Donald Sadoway, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes the technology has the potential to provide the “missing piece” in an electricity market that relies on “redundancy and overcapacity” to balance supply and demand – a feature that will become even more pronounced as the penetration of variable renewable-energy supply expands. Speaking at the Power & Electricity World Africa 2017 conference and exhibition in Johannesburg this week, the cofounder of a company called Ambri, set up with support from software billionaire Bill Gates to commercialise the battery, argued that grid-scale electricity storage could change the power market much as refrigeration had food supply.