The Rise of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) for Stationary Battery Storage Applications

Nickel Manganese Cobalt chemistries have dominated energy storage for the past few years, but Lithium Iron (Ferrous) Phosphate is now making a name for itself as the go-to chemistry for stationary storage and is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

In this clip from Solar Power International (SPI) 2020, CEA's Chris Wright shows why LFP energy storage has a lower risk for thermal runaway.

When LIBs are operated improperly, either outside of the specifications of its manufacturer or due to cell defects, electrical and chemical energies inside the cells can be unintentionally released and lead to gassing, fires, or even explosions. During these incidents, the most energetic catastrophic failure of a LIB system is a cascading thermal runaway event

Video Transcript:

And thermal runaway is always the big concern for lithium-ion batteries. As you can see by the graph on the top left the energetics of an LFP thermal runaway failure are much lower than that of in NCM or NCA.

This substantially reduces the risk of a cascading failure of whereby a single cell failure propagates to the adjacent cells and then through the module and even module to module to rack. This provides a safer option, which is easier to mitigate.