Prospective life cycle assessment of organic flow batteries

Conference poster, 2024

Organic redox flow batteries are emerging as a promising stationary energy storage solutions due to their versatility in meeting power and energy requirements across various application scales, as well as their long lifespan, low self-discharge, heightened safety, and the avoidance of expensive minerals. Evaluating the environmental performance of technologies during their early development stages is crucial for identifying potential environmental impacts and guiding technology development. This study assessed the environmental performance of two emerging TEMPO-based redox flow batteries: an all-organic flow battery (OFB) and a hybrid flow battery (HFB), using life cycle assessment (LCA). The environmental impacts of the two batteries are benchmarked to the conventional vanadium flow battery (VFB). Two functional unit were considered: 1 kWh theoretical storage capacity and 1 kWh electricity delivered over the battery lifetime. This study constructed a battery deisgn model based on industrial data and design equations, calculating the required amount of battery materials. Additionally, a battery performance model was built to estimate the amount of electrolyte requried and the energy delivered over the battery´s lifetime. Moreover, a global sensitivity analysis (GSA) was performaned to discover the relative contribution of input parameters to the total uncertinty. Overall, the results showed that OFB and HFB outperformed VFB in most impact categories, except for freshwater ecotoxicity and resource depoletion. Regaring the relative contribution of battery components, the energy subsystem are the biggest contributor to the total impacts regardless of the battery type, functional unit, and the environmental impact categories. This is associated to the high environmental emissions of the electrolyte. GSA highlighted that electrolyte capacity fade is the parameter affecting the results most , emphasizing the need for battery researchers to prioritize improvements in this performance parameter for the development of sustainable flow batteries.