Environmental Assessment of Electrochemical Energy Storage Device Manufacturing to Identify Drivers for Attaining Goals of Sustainable Materials 4.0

Abstract

Electricity from the combination of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines exhibits potential benefits towards the sustainable cities transition. Nevertheless, the highly fluctuating and intermittent character limits an extended applicability in the energy market. Particularly, batteries represent a challenging approach to overcome the existing constraints and to achieve sustainable urban energy development. On the basis of the market roll-out and level of technological maturity, five commercially available battery technologies are assessed in this work, namely, lead–acid, lithium manganese oxide, nickel–cadmium, nickel–metal hydride, and vanadium redox flow. When considering sustainable development, environmental assessments provide valuable information. In this vein, an environmental analysis of the technologies is conducted using a life cycle assessment methodology from a cradle-to-gate perspective. A comparison of the environmental burden of battery components identified vanadium redox flow battery as the lowest environmental damage battery. In terms of components, electrodes; the electrolyte; and the set of pumps, motors, racks, and bolts exhibited the greatest environmental impact related to manufacturing. In terms of materials, copper, steel, sulphuric acid, and vanadium were identified as the main contributors to the midpoint impact categories. The results have highlighted that challenging materials 4.0 are still needed in battery manufacturing to provide sustainable technology designs required to the future urban planning based on circular economy demands.

Battery Manufacturing Resource Assessment to Minimise Component Production Environmental Impacts

“…The raw material mining and conditioning for the components manufacturing were also considered. Based on previous work [14], the component production stage exhibited a greater environmental impact compared with the assembly stage in most impact categories. Accordingly, this study excludes the energy consumption for assembling.…”

“…LCI involves all the inputs and outputs (energy and material) considering the functional unit, timescale and system boundaries previously established. In this work, LCI was mainly generated from in-house databases, based on results previously published by authors [14] and complemented by an exhaustive review of available data in the literature and Ecoinvent 3.4 database [23]. To attain normalised information in respect to the functional unit and timescale, the information for each battery was collected in terms of (i) battery characteristics and (ii) battery composition (gathered as weight per cent distribution) and energy requirements for assembling.…”

“…According to a previous published work from authors [14], lithium-ion (Li-ion) and redox flow batteries (RFB) constitute the ones with more potential development opportunities on the battery market, based on the ongoing evolution of batteries, their technological maturity, market roll-out level and related costs, [14][15][16]. In this vein, a deeper comparative analysis of the two batteries was carried out in this work, while considering the evaluation of recycling scenarios for steel, copper, aluminium and plastic materials to the battery manufacturing stage.…”

A Framework and Baseline for the Integration of a Sustainable Circular Economy in Offshore Wind

“…A broader Scopus search for literature on the interface of the subjects of "circular economy" and "wind" (3 June 2021) returned 91 publications, of which 39 hold direct importance and 27 are peripherally relevant-66 in total (Figure 1). About a third of the 66 titles broadly discuss: the role of wind and other renewable energy technologies to power a sustainable and circular economy [57,58,[67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77], or battery storage (e.g., [72,78]) and the potential for integration with a hydrogen economy to avoid a loss of generated wind power (e.g., [79]), using hydrogen subsequently in methanol production [80][81][82]. Schoden et al [83] present a project to raise public awareness about the need for a circular economy for wind turbines.…”

Assessment of Potential Barriers to the Implementation of an Innovative AB-FB Energy Storage System under a Sustainable Perspective

“…Energy storage systems (ESSs), such as batteries, are challenging and promising tools to overcome the limitations of electricity generation based on solar and wind energy sources [1]. These types of resources involve strong fluctuation and intermittency, hindering proper grid electricity supply [2] and, thus, are an emerging technological challenge to be solved.…”