Economical and technical analysis of electrochemical battery energy storage systems along their value chain: a feasibility study

The goal of this project is to assess the industrial feasibility of electrochemical battery technologies, considering their whole supply chains. The Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS) is used to realistically compare different technologies; Lithium-ion NMC chemistries are used as a benchmark. This project serves as a decision-making tool for a company to compare battery systems in a more holistic way, including factors affecting the whole supply chain and the risks associated with it. The main aims of this project are: •??To develop a methodology evaluating how supply chain risks might hinder the scalability of a technology •??To create a model where the user can enter general techno-economical factors of a system and get a set of useful comparative graphs as an output •??To analyze the impact that the factors developed might have in its LCOS Four factors have been developed in the first stage, coherently assessing the supply risk of Critical Raw Materials for a technology and the readiness level of components and system. The model successfully provides graphical comparisons of the LCOS, the supply risk, and the readiness level factors, after the user inputs specific parameters. Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries are chosen as the technology to be compared to Li-ion NMC technologies, obtaining insights in how the LCOS and factors developed impact both technologies. The promising results help to open new perspectives in the electrochemical battery systems analysis domain and provide a first-of-a-kind holistic assessment of the feasibility of development of battery energy storage systems. Finally, this document is divided into 5 main sections: introduction, methodology created, model developed, results obtained, and conclusions of the work. •??Keywords: battery, energy storage, supply chain, feasibility, LCOS