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Redflow has stated that its systems can achieve 100 percent depth-of-discharge, meaning on a per-kilowatt-hour basis, they are cost-competitive with other market players," said Simon.
Ron Van Dell, CEO of U.S. flow battery maker ViZn Energy, also said the technology should be able to beat lithium-ion for residential applications. “Flow batteries typically last for 20 years without aggressive degradation,” he said. “We’re seeing lithium-ion warranties that show nearly 50 percent degradation over a five- to 10-year period. Customers want 20-year lifetimes to match their solar system’s expected useful life.”
Redflow unveiled its 5-kilowatt, 10-kilowatt-hour ZCell home battery in June. The company says the fully installed cost of the ZCell, including inverter and sales tax, should be between AUD $17,500 and $19,500 (USD $13,000 and $14,500).
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The ZCell uses a zinc-bromide electrolyte and is about 80 percent smaller than a standard flow battery. Redflow marketing manager Sciobhan Leahy said the technology allows for faster charging than lithium-ion because of its linear charge and discharge voltages.
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According a battery storage comparison by Australian website SolarQuotes, the ZCell beats the Tesla Powerwall (and, indeed, all other residential batteries on the market) on a cost-per-total-warranted-kilowatt-hour basis.
Susan Kennedy, CEO of Advanced Microgrid Solutions, has observed, “The entire electrical distribution system is designed around a single premise: You cannot store energy.”
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“Utilities are going to spend probably a trillion dollars over the course of the next decade in the United States chasing the loading curve. We can harness the consumer as a manager of loads. It is the cleanest, fastest, most flexible resource for the grid. It will actually allow us to shape the loading curve instead of chasing it.”
Australian Vanadium Ltd... made its first [Vanadium flow] battery sale in May as part of its distribution agreement with GILDEMEISTER Energy Storage GmbH.
This will be Western Australia’s first vanadium flow battery and it is currently being shipping from the Austrian factory with commissioning expected in September.
AVL also purchased a vanadium electrolyte pilot plant during June for which construction is underway by leading UK technology company C-Tech Innovation Ltd.
The company continues to advance further battery sale proposals and is currently working on multiple tender responses for energy storage systems within Australia.
EnSciTech located in Alberta, Canada is working on clean initiatives within the oil sands industry. The primary purpose is to convert waste [??] from the oil sands into battery materials for leading storage technologies. The process recovers secondary high purity vanadium from oil sands helping Canada to meet energy storage and renewable energy targets for North America. EnSciTEch is currently planning development of their vanadium electrolyte pilot plant, which would facilitate Alberta's climate change commitment by reducing wastes from the oil sands industry and transforming them into [flow] battery materials.
Harvard researchers have identified a whole new class of high-performing organic molecules, inspired by vitamin B2, that can safely store electricity from intermittent energy sources like solar and wind power in large batteries.
The development builds on previous work in which the team developed a high-capacity flow battery that stored energy in organic molecules called quinones and a food additive called ferrocyanide.
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Now, after considering about a million different quinones, we have developed a new class of battery electrolyte material that expands the possibilities of what we can do," said Kaixiang Lin, a Ph.D. student at Harvard and first author of the paper. "Its simple synthesis means it should be manufacturable on a large scale at a very low cost, which is an important goal of this project."
Canadian vanadium producer Largo Resources has entered into a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) for an offtake agreement with Massachusetts-based energy technology firm with Vionx Energy.
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The MoU set out the principal terms upon which Largo and Vionx, which developed, produced and sols (sic) [sells?] vanadium redox flow batteries (VRBs) for utility grid applications, would continue discussions that could lead to the supply by Largo of vanadium electrolyte to Vionx to further the research and development of advanced VRBs, using VNX Grid Energy Storage Systems.
Sherwood Partners, corporate undertaker, "has been engaged by Imergy to market and sell the Company’s assets, including all of its valued intellectual property assets," according to an offering obtained by GTM -- in case you're interested in starting a flow battery company on the cheap.
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The now-bankrupt SunEdison had agreed to buy up to 1,000 of Imergy's 30-kilowatt units over the next three years for deployment in, wait for it, India, of course. It was by far the biggest single mirage of an order that Imergy -- or perhaps any other flow battery manufacturer -- had ever received. And it disappeared just like SunEdison.
The current benchmark is a Nafion membrane. This membrane is chemically stable and permeable for protons and is well known for H2 fuel cell applications. However, Nafion and similar polymers swell when exposed to water and loose their barrier function for vanadium ions.
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"We use a hydrophobic membrane instead. This membrane keeps its barrier functions since it does not swell in water... We were pleasantly surprised when we discovered tiny pores and channels in the hydrophobic material and they appear to be filled with water. These water channels allow protons to travel through the membrane with high speed. The vanadium ions, however, are too large to pass the membrane." ...Even after one week or 100 charging and discharging cycles vanadium ions could not pass the membrane. "We reached an energy efficiency of up to 99 percent, depending on the current. This shows that our membrane is a true barrier for the vanadium ions," says Wessling. At all current densities tested, between 1 and 40 milliampere per square centimeter, the scientists reached 85 percent energy efficiency or more whereas conventional systems do not exceed 76 percent.
Ann Arbor-based Arotech Corp. will discontinue a battery storage project of several years at month's end and put its intellectual property out for bidders, in a move that also terminates former company Chairman Robert Ehrlich's employment contract.
President-CEO Steven Esses said in a statement Monday that Arotech's Iron Flow Storage project is still "highly promising" but requires too much capital for the company to develop it further.
In the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the Ohio State University engineers describe the "smart" membrane that they hope will enable the development of a new category of fast-charging and powerful batteries called "redox transistor batteries" for automobiles that will travel farther on a single charge.
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Sundaresan and doctoral student Travis Hery call their invention an "ionic redox transistor," and they're using it to develop a new kind of battery in which energy is stored in a liquid electrolyte—which people can recharge or empty out and refill as they would refill a gas tank.
"For everyday commuting, the electrolyte can be simply regenerated by plugging it into a power outlet overnight or while parked at the garage. For long road trips, you could empty out the used electrolyte and refill the battery to get the kind of long driving range we are accustomed to with internal combustion engines," Sundaresan said.
"We were trying to develop a different electrochemistry for a battery," Sadoway explains, as an extension of the variety of chemical formulations for the all-liquid, high temperature storage batteries that his lab has been developing for several years. The different parts of these batteries are composed of molten metals or salts that have different densities and thus inherently form separate layers, much as oil floats on top of water. "We wanted to investigate the utility of putting a second electrolyte between the positive and negative electrodes" of the liquid battery, Sadoway says.
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But the experiment didn't go quite as planned. "We found that when we went to charge this putative battery, we were in fact producing liquid antimony [!!!] instead of charging the battery," Sadoway says.
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In typical smelting processes, the sulfur would immediately bond with oxygen in the air to form sulfur dioxide, a significant air pollutant and the major cause of acid rain. But instead this contained process provides highly purified metal without the need to worry about scrubbing out the polluting gas.
Electrolysis is much more efficient than traditional heat-based smelting methods, because it is a single-step continuous process, Sadoway explains. The discovery of that process is what transformed aluminum, more than a century ago, from a precious metal more valuable than silver into a widely used inexpensive commodity. If the process could be applied to other common industrial metals such as copper, it would have the potential to significantly lower prices as well as reduce the air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with traditional production.
“The technology has moved faster than anyone has expected and what you see today is a system that is a commodity product,” Mr McGregor says. “This is ready to scale.”
It is not just redT that believes the time has come for vanadium flow batteries. Late last year, Japan’s Sumitomo Electric Industries started operation of a 60MWh battery system the size of a large building on the northern island of Hokkaido. Sumitomo plans to release shipping container-sized flow batteries soon. German manufacturer Gildemeister already sells them as part of its Cellcube energy storage system.
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Installing the planned seven RedT units, each with capacity of 240 kWh, will allow the community to store electricity for sale when the grid can accept it and also potentially stabilise supply to the island itself.
VSUN Pty Ltd, a unit of Australian Vanadium Ltd (ASX:AVL), said on Wednesday it has installed the first vanadium redox flow battery in the Australian state of Western Australia.
The battery, coupled with a 15-kW solar system, has been installed on a farm near Busselton...
The CellCube vanadium redox flow battery storage system was produced by Gildemeister Energy Storage GmbH in Austria and then shipped to Western Australia. It can time shift up to 10 hours of power usage and has the advantage of three-phase power. The cost of the project including the CellCube FB10-100 storage unit and the solar system is AUD 164,000 (USD 122,500/EUR 111,300) excluding shipping costs, according to the announcement.
Tesla announced Thursday that it had been selected by Southern California Edison to construct the storage project in Riverside County.
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The company says the facility will store 80 megawatt hours of energy. That's enough to power more than 2,500 households for a day.
It is expected to go online by the end of this year.
The companies [that have signed up to sell Redflow's zCells] have been trained by Redflow chairman and CEO Simon Hackett, who is also the company’s largest shareholder, and whose IT company wrote the software to integrate the battery into an energy management system. He is also the company’s first customer.
The ZCell is unlike most competing battery storage technologies because it is a “flow battery” using zinc bromine [as an electrolyte], rather than lithium-ion. Redflow says this allows for greater depth of discharge and more cycles, which means that while more expensive than most of its rivals, it’s “delivered” cost is comparable.
The company expect the fully installed cost of a 10kWh ZCell based energy storage system will start from $17,500 – $19,500 [~UW$ 13,190 – 14,700] , including GST.
Redflow says it has received more than 1,200 “serious” inquiries into its battery storage technologies.
Kemwatt has successfully designed, assembled and tested a 10 kW industrial prototype of an Organic Redox Flow Battery that can store electricity from renewable sources...
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[Redox flow batteries] used highly acidic, corrosive electrolytes resulting in reliability, lifetime, safety and environmental issues.
Thanks to its non-corrosive, alkaline chemistry and its more natural molecules, Kemwatt’s Organic Redox Flow Battery solves these problems and makes large-scale implementation possible, whether for industrial purposes or remote areas.
Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a better idea: integrating the solar cell with a large-capacity [redox flow] battery. He and his colleagues have made a single device that eliminates the usual intermediate step of making electricity and, instead, transfers the energy directly to the battery's electrolyte.
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[The team has] demonstrated a single device that converts light energy into chemical energy by directly charging the liquid electrolyte.
ViZn Energy Systems, Inc. (ViZn), a leading provider of non-toxic flow battery energy storage systems, announced today that it is offering an optional 95 percent power guarantee on their large scale energy storage systems for up to 20 years. ... The guarantee is straightforward, simple, and is independent of battery duty cycle or energy throughput.
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ViZn's flow batteries are manufactured by [a] team in Florida and the technology utilizes a non-toxic, low-cost zinc and iron chemistry that makes sighting and permitting relatively painless and time efficient. Unlike lithium-ion battery systems, ViZn's versatile flow batteries are capable of performing both high-power and long-duration applications.
Australian battery storage developer Redflow is off to a flying start for its new ZCell product, saying it has already received a $600,000 order from a Melbourne-based energy system installer, Standard Solar.
The $600,000 order is for 48 of the 10kWh zinc bromine flow batteries, suggesting the their wholesale price – at bulk – is about $12,500. Fully installed, with inverters etc, the system has been pitched at around $18,000.
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Standard Solar chief technology officer James Graham... says his company has already sold about half the ZCells from this initial order.