Technology Trending: AI bird monitoring, LFP battery prototype, lithium for EVs, Moon to Mars

AI to monitor bird interactions with solar PV, lithium iron phosphate battery production coming in Europe, a lithium mine for EV batteries and the energy infrastructure requirements in the Moon to Mars exploration are on the week’s technology radar.

AI for the birds

All electricity infrastructure is a potential haven or hazard for birds and while numerous studies have been done on the impacts of for example transmission lines and wind turbines, little has been undertaken on the increasingly widespread solar facilities.

Scientists at the US DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory are now redressing this gap with a three-year project to deploy advanced cameras and artificial intelligence to monitor the bird activity at these facilities.

Already video collected at such sites is being used to train computer algorithms to recognise birds in the scenes and to classify specific types of avian activities, including flying between and above panels, perching on panels, landing on the ground and colliding with panels.

“We don’t have a full picture of how birds use these sites, because the minute you put someone on the ground, the birds fly off or they do something in reaction to the human surveyor,” says Misti Sporer, environmental development director for Duke Energy, which operates more than 65 solar plants in the US.

For example, often the cause of bird fatalities is not apparent but the collection of a large amount of near-real-time data on collisions including the season, time of day and speed and trajectory of the bird could help to understand the cause and magnitude of these.

First lithium iron phosphate battery cell prototype in Europe

Serbian lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery pioneer ElevenEs has reported the production of a prototype of what it calls “the largest battery cell in Europe” following a two-year development programme and expects to start customer deliveries in the first quarter of 2023.

LiFP technology is expected to take up a significant proportion of the battery market, in particular for electric vehicles (EVs), due to its safety, cost and sustainability benefits over Li-ion batteries. In EVs LFP batteries have been found to provide twice the longevity of other technologies and several manufacturers including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes and Ford have already introduced them.

“After creating and testing more than 500 laboratory sample cells, we have developed the final cell chemistry and design,” says Nemanja Mikać, CEO of ElevenEs, commenting that three cell sizes will be offered.

ElevenEs also is expanding its production capabilities, with the first step to gigafactory scale targeting 8GWh for 200,000 EVs per year by the end of 2025.

Currently, most of the LFP cell production has been in China.

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Lithium mine for EVs

Meanwhile, Canadian miner Snow Lake Lithium is developing a renewables powered all-electric lithium mine to supply the resource to the North American EV industry.

Snow Lake Lithium’s 22,250ha site is expected to produce 160,000t of 6% lithium spodumene a year over a 10-year period – enough to power around 5 million EVs, or about 500,000 EVs per year. But the company is confident that its estimated resource could increase as currently only approximately 1% of the site has been explored.

To enable a seamless integration of the supply chain, Snow Lake Lithium plans to establish a joint venture lithium hydroxide processing plants in CentrePort, Winnipeg in southern Manitoba.

An MOU has been inked with LG Energy Solutions to explore this opportunity, which would include the 10-year supply of lithium to LG following the start of commercial production, which is targeted for 2025.

Moon to Mars

NASA has released its Moon to Mars strategy to develop a blueprint for sustained human presence and exploration in the solar system.

The strategy contains no less than 63 final objectives in the areas of science, transportation and habitation, infrastructure on the two bodies and operations.

With electricity key for any form of habitation, little wonder that the top infrastructure objectives are to develop an incremental lunar power generation and distribution system that is evolvable to support continuous robotic/human operation and is capable of scaling to global power utilization and industrial power levels and to develop Mars surface power sufficient for an initial human exploration campaign.

The former of these is already well under way and in due course any implementation will require suitably trained energy personnel. For those lucky enough to go on to Mars, they can start preparing with the newly release Marstimer – a watch based on Omega’s Speedmaster that was developed with the European Space Agency and displays the time on both the Earth and Mars.

“Space-tough and Mars-mission ready” is the tagline for the watch, which was developed for ESA engineers and scientists to help operate the planned Rosalind Franklin Mars rover.