Has The Great Flow Battery Battle Started?

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Graphene ultra caps should have been around for a long time but may have the usual military patent hold ups.
They could set the graphene in a moderator matrix that would limit discharge rate for both safety and to provide for planned obsolescence. Silicon and Germanium are used for common diodes.

Very old conspiracy here with Dr Goodenough and the Li-ion..

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.

Source: Greentech Media.com, July 6, 2016 - Can Redflow’s Home Flow Battery Really Beat Lithium-Ion?

The article is a great write up on Zcell and associated technology. The battery can be used with other technology including the electronic switch (Redback Technologies) that will cut-over to the battery in the event of black out (and maintain charge current when not doing that). And there is mention of being compatible with Dutch and US equipment makers as well. They even state the concerns of using zinc-bromide and how the Zcell actively monitors for any leaks, is a completely sealed system surrounded by another containment system.

The 100% discharge is interesting because you can run the thing out and it can stay that way with no degradation. The photo reminds me of a cross between the iMac stylish case and the old Mac Quadra blocky thing! The article ends with a note of warning saying battery prices have "dropped 70% in the last 18 months" (same source) but that statement came from a rival CTO (and they do not distinguish which battery type he is talking about, I am assuming Li-ion).

The 20-year life span keeps being mentioned and they explain why. Because that is the expected life time of home solar panels. Makes sense to want to have a single end date for the entire package. I haven't even looked into solar costs I was more interested in grid-level energy storage and keep running across this product.

So there is progress in the home market. Grid level storage still needs to be demonstrated and then personal use (home market) should increase dramatically. Something to watch for the rest of the year to see what happens with flow batteries.

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.”

Source: Greentehmedia.com, July 11, 2016 - Advanced Microgrid Solutions Gets $200M From Macquarie to Finance Aggregated Energy Storage.

To give fair play to the other side, these are the guys out of San Francisco that purchased a bunch of Tesla Powercells and plan on using them to shift and shave/load balancing for the power grid by having batteries at industrial sites and buildings. The rest of the article is about how they plan to achieve their goals and make money. I do not think Lithium ion (repackaged, off the shelf batteries with value added --more money-- software is going to be profitable in the long run, but that is OK. At least somebody out there is trying to make our world a better place. And this was whole premise of the thread anyway, "has the battle started?") is the answer.

But what the CEO said is spot on! The power grid was created to shove energy down the line and that was about it. If the CEO of this company can see that power distribution needs to change then I can admit they can fulfill a niche and carve out a space that adds benefit to the distribution of power. I mean there is no "great battle" but more of an armistice where boarders are redrawn and resources split. Unless the Li-ion market collapses (grapheme-aluminum-oxygen battery is made in production volumes) then last gasp, no man standing, fight to the death, could be the norm. But in the upcoming decade, yes, our grid is going to change drastically. I see flow batteries at the power stations, spread out among neighborhoods, even at office buildings and hospitals. AMS can play their role too maybe sell the farm, get rich, and provide the software to load balance/shift battery power around. Who knows? But something to keep an eye on.

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.

Source: Proactiveinvestors.com (.au), July 13, 2016 - Austr alian Vanadium Ltd ships first vanadium flow battery from Austria.

This news is still in the investment section! So GILDEMEISTER made the battery and it is now being shipped to Australia. I wonder if there are many more prospects of buyers or are they going to hold off until they can see the results of this unit coming online. Positive progress is better than negative progress!

Nice update!

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.

Source: Newswire.com (.ca), News, July 14, 2016 - EnSci Tech Inc. signs partnership agreement with Vanadium Electrolyte Process Partnership.

Two thins pop out at me. First is, "Hey somebody in North America is taking an initiative towards energy storage" so that is cool. Second, vanadium as a waste product?? They may end up making more money from converting vanadium into electrolytes than the oil they get out of the sands (at these prices anyway). I guess the old adage of "one man's waste is another man's treasure" is still true in our middle modern era.

Cool that they are cleaning up their mess and in the process making something of value. More of this needs to happen in industry--a vertical solution with a minimum amount of waste. It is happening in the restaurant industry as they grow their own or local source and watch the amount of waste produced so why not other industries? The typical, "It cost too much" argument falls short when it comes to hazard materials. I don't mean go on a rant but where h3ll is America in all this? If the economic models of he 19080's and the 1900's are not working why are they still being followed? Do all CEOs have to be Daddy Warbucks or the top hat wearing millionaire in Monopoly? When is enough, enough? While the environment crumbles...

Thanks Dennis Miller for the inspiration! I have no way to end that line of thought because I think this is great news about repurposing waste product to something useful... vanadium electrolyte for flow batteries!

News from the Harvard researchers.

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."

Source: Techsplore.com, July 18, 2016 - A battery inspired by vitamins: 'New universe' of organic molecules that can store energy in flow batteries.

Nice to see organic electrolytes still being investigated. Based on riboflavin?! That is a crazy idea! Add this to the Berkley database and there is a treasure trove for flow battery researchers. And trying "a million different quinones" to see which one is better... the hard work is done! Cheap, organic flow battery anyone?

Awesome!

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.

Source: MiningWeekly.com, June 18, 2016 - Largo makes vanadium-redox flow battery mark with nonbinding offtake MoU

Oh, this is big news here! Massachusetts is setting up grid-level flow batteries (I think the largest in the US) with help from the DOE (again, if I remember correctly). So a producer of vanadium has a mutual, above-board agreement to not only supply but refine vanadium to electrolyte stage for grid-level redox flow batteries. It is sooo on right now! I believe that there will be a ton of tours as utilities go take a look to see how MA is utilizing these storage devices and the derived benefits. They will spring up across the land.

Next up? Maybe a view of the ARC fusion device in action supplying power? Probably too soon for that. But the pieces are lining up that way.

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.

Source: Greentechmedia.com - Flow Battery Aspirant Imergy Has Let Go Its Staff and Is Selling Its Assets.

Well, thought things were bad with them after SunEdison disappeared but did not think they would close shop. Seems a bit extreme. Bummer. As the article notes, most venture capital funded companies fail. Strange that the energy storage market has grown. But hey if you cannot make a product and vaporware growth evaporates then you are left swinging in the breeze.

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.

Source: ScienceDaily, July 22, 2016 – A hydrophobic membrane with nanopores for highly efficient energy storage.

A 23% increase?! One nice aspect of flow batteries is that if one aspect of the technology improves you can just swap out that component. New electrolyte formulation? If it is the same size chemistry, flush the system and filler 'er up! New membrane? If it fits my battery and blocks the electrolyte then flush the system and swap it out. And if you are still building a battery it is even quicker!

The water in the pores reminds me of proton transport in carbon nanotubes. If they make CNTs small enough water goes in as a chain and proton transport goes through the roof. Nanowerk story - link.

Great news for vanadium redox flow batteries! Of course, it the material lasts, further testing, etc.

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.

Crain's Detroit Business, Aug. 22, 2016 - Arotech to end battery storage project, seeks buyer for intellectual property.

I never really thought that the iron flow battery concept was well conceived to begin with! With the "breakthrough" announcement from Harvard on July 31 (those who have read this thread from the beginning know that the real breakthrough was in 2013--or maybe 2014--and they were just perfecting it since then) and their inorganic electrolyte, it was/is only a matter of time for the smaller players to reach Arotech's status.

Expect other smaller players to either sell off or be bought out during the next year.

For those that know what a membrane is and how it works this story should come as no surprise. But it is kind of neat how the concept of flow batteries is taking hold in the regular world. Now if only we can get the graphene supercapacitors up and running...

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.

Phys.org, Aug. 23, 2016 - New technology may give electric car drivers more miles per minute of charging

So these researchers have created transistors that have an electrolyte inside of them that hold charge and a membrane between to be used as a one-way gate. That way, when not using the charged electrolyte the electricity is not flowing across the membrane. So you get the best of both worlds--fast charging capacitors and the performance (and 100% discharge) of a flow battery!

The article states the best performance electric cars have made is "0.4 miles/minute charge" which is a crazy stat to know! So Mr. Musk, your car's battery performance sucks! If this technology gains a foothold (or the graphene aluminum battery comes to market) then Tesla is doomed. They have at least to the start of 2017 to get their act together or they will be over run by these advances.

[ETA: Harvard is going to field test their flow batteries in 2017. Cheap $100 per kilowatt grid scale flow batteries appear in the 2020-2025 timeframe. As the title states looking at 2020 which is about the time Lockheed is looking for a demo of their fusion reactor. Funny those coincidences!]

This is kind of flow battery related...

"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.

Phys.org, Aug 25, 2016 -New method developed for producing some metals.

Are you serious?! Even when they make mistakes the team at MIT discovers something new! So they tried to use antimony sulfide as the second electrolyte but vaporized off the sulfur and ended up with 99.9% pure antimony!! LOL!

Like they said, traditional methods of a heat furnace create a lot of CO2 emissions and usually something unwanted like an acid. They said this process should work with any sulfide material.

for the accidental discovery!

“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.

Source: Financial Times, www.ft.com (world>UK), Sept 13, 2016 - Battery that could revolutionise renewables on trial in Scotland.

Way to go Scotland! They have a wind farm on the island Gigha and are currently throttling back on electricity production because it is making too much to put on the grid! So they will now store the electricity in seven flow batteries to place on the grid as needed. This is the world’s first go live of such a large system. Many in the industry will be keeping an eye on how this progresses. The RedT FB are being made and sold at lower costs than other manufacturers and a real world solution will be a major selling point.

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.

Source: SeeNews, Renewables, Sept. 15, 2016 - VSUN installs vanadium redox flow battery on Western Australia farm.

Another real world installation! 10 hours with a 15 kW solar farm for a mean $123,000?! That will pay for itself in no time. If you go to the article there is a picture of the CellCube and it is a rather ordinary looking power transformer-like object. It is sitting on a concrete pad and it looks like the power transmission lines are underground so it is kind of sleek and sexy!

So, an installation in Scotland and now one in Australia. Soon, one in Massachusetts and one huge array in China. See power distribution change before your eyes!!

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.

Source: Phys.org, Sept. 16, 2016 – Tesla to build California utility battery storage project.

Li-ion as a grid-level storage device? OhhhKaaaayy... How long before it catches fire like the Samsung 7 phones (actually, they are saying all Samsung phones could catch fire)? How long will the batteries last before they have to be replaced? Can they stand a full discharge? The WallCharger thing says 3-5 years (I think) before the batteries need to be replaced. Assuming the same life span… Geebus that is a lot of batteries! In 3-5 years the li-ion battery will be gone. Hope Mr Musk has an upgrade strategy.

Actually, 80 MWh is a pretty big number. The Scotland announcement is 1.7 MWh but that is for a wind farm! So Mr Musk’s “announcement” looks big… on paper. They throttled back the Samsung battery to 60% which if it is similar that is only 48 MW which is not nearly as large amount of storage. How huge is this thing? It must be the size of a building! How much heat does it generate while charging? I have doubts that it really reaches 80 MWh! Other companies offer storage container size batteries for grid-level storage in the 1-4 MWh range… so 20 (or more) storage containers worth of repackaged batteries??

I guess it is nice to see a response to the redox flow battery announcements of the last few days.

The battle continuers!

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.

Source: Reneweconomy.com (.au), Sept. 19, 2016 - Redflow says first ZCell batteries to be installed in homes in October.

The core component is the computer controlled charge-discharge system and the auto-switching between grid power and the battery. There had been a set-back in delivery dates but they’re on schedule for an October release. The use of these in the home is going to change how utilities view home use which will influence their decision on grid-level storage. Primarily being sold as a solar backup system if there is any sort of power outage those with even approximately 8 hours of electricity per household would be better off than those without. The article states Redlfow expects demand “will exceed” their initial supply for the remainder of the year (same source).

Way to lead us to the future Australia!

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.

Source: SolarNovusToday, Sept. 21, 2016 - Kemwatt Designs, Assembles and Tests Organic Redox Flow Battery.

No word as to if this involves the Harvard announcement from a couple of years ago or not. The timeline would suggest that is what has happened but this article does not state so... so the two may no be related. Also, there is no mention of what the electrolytes are made of which is just bad reporting. But this is still great news despite those missing details! Another player is always welcomed! Gives me more to post about. 10 kWh flow battery is a good start. The announcement makes it sound like South Park's Underwear gnomes! "Stage 2 - profit" because a small prototype (basically a household size battery) is a far cry from grid-level storage (most developers are using shipping containers).

Just like there are all kinds of batteries for consumers to use, from watch batteries to boats, the flow battery market can absorb all kinds. To keep a lid on rising vanadium prices alone this is a good announcement!

*Face palm* moment! From the, "Why didn't I think of that" comes this article...

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.

Source: Phys.org, Sept. 22, 2016 - A marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery.

I guess you can chalk it all up to thinking of things being serial. As in, first you do this, then you do that, after that you... etc. So the simplest step is to always cut out the middle man! So it makes sense to just charge the electrolyte directly from solar cells and when you reach saturation you cycle in new electrolytes. Lather, rinse, repeat. See, no need to actually make electricity! D'oh! But it is also like the home stereo, you can have an all-in-one device or the best single components; and if you already started down the component path you will probably stick to that path instead of #-canning your efforts to date.

Anywy, this is a really great idea! Way to think outside the box. I believe that more discoveries will be made thinking in this manner.

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.

Source: Marketwired, press release, Oct. 3, 2016 - ViZn's New 20 Year Warranty and 95% Power Guarantee Sets the Bar for Stationary Energy Storage.

Wow is that some guarantee! These guys have been investigating their own electrolyte compounds and decided that vanadium was not a good fit with their company's vision. So a zinc and iron mixture was made. This is the kind of news that usually is a yawner because they usually start talking ROI and TCO and some such (like "sighting and permitting" above) but for anybody sitting on the fence with a lean capital budget this warranty would seem like a miracle.

With so many flow batteries ready to come out there is no doubt that the battle has started.

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.

Source: Onestepoffthegrid.com (.au), Oct. 2, 2016 - Redflow gets $600,000 battery storage order from Melbourne installer.

The article goes on to say that the mix is about 70-30 with the main bulk of customers being knowledgeable to very knowledgeable about batteries, capacities, depth cycles, etc., while other have heard about RFBs and wanted to stabilize their energy usage (i.e., costs). One customer wants to go completely off the grid. I think all amounts quoted are in Australia currency. Still, 18K for a completely installed ZCell is not bad.

So the real world tests have begun! Way to go Australia!