Sapan Gai, CCO at Sovereign Metals, discusses their superior graphite test results. Watch the video here.
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No mention of end of life costs decommissioning between the two VRFB wins hands down with probably three times life expectancy.
It's going to take time. We are still in the transitional phase of moving away from fossil fuels to renewables:– such transitions don't occure overnight – regardless of the disruptive power BMN has within this sector. The fundamentals haven't changed, ergo until such a time we must exercise patience.
beginerman - because the situation is developing and the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet. Thanks for the compliment though.
In other words burying their heads in the sand. Thanks for your detailed response Alpha... much obliged.
For example:- "Energy Storage Technology and Cost Characterization Report - July 2019" as part of the Hydrowires project, USDOE
Table 4.3 (Costs for a 1MW/4MWh battery system)
Lithium Ion : Total Project Cost 469 USD/KWh, Total No of Cycles 3,500
VRFB : Total Project Cost 858 USD/KWh, Total No of Cycles 10,000
So you get roughly 3 times the amount of energy stored and transmitted by a VRFB, for less than double the initial build cost.
Furthermore on what is this price based ? Table 4.16 shows 13 sources of costs, of which 12 are academic studies.
The only commercial information on VRFB pricing in Table 4.16, is for a 5kW/ 20 kWh battery from RedT.
The cost is explicitly listed as USD 490/kWh which works out around USD 800/KWh when you add in all the extra balance of plant costs, but for crying out loud, this is a cost based on a 20kWh module - for a 4MWh battery that is 200 times larger ! There are huge benefits of scaling a VRFB that are completely missed out from this.
They are aware of it, they just assume that the costs from years ago are still accurate, which they are not.
... as far as I am concerned the UK university sector has a Not-Invented Here, or more precisely, we're-not-going-to-get-anything-out-of-it-here, attitude and the civil service has effectively given up on the UK building strategic industries, preferring to leave it to the market to decide, by which time the market has already decided to build it's stuff elsewhere. Thus I think the UK has pretty much given up and accepted that it has missed the boat on large scale energy storage.
This is in no way a reflection of the fundamental advantages of VRFB technology, it is more an observation on how the UK well handles the early stage commercialisation of new technology.
magellaniccloud - the question of whether the UK policymakers understand what is needed for balancing the grid is one that I have spent the last 18 months trying to understand. They have been distracted, I know, but the August power cut will hopefully now be refocussing minds.
There are a number of structural issues which means that UK policymakers are blind to VRFBs:
1) they have heard of RedT, have provided it with BIS (previously the DTI) funding and are generally equate the entire VRFB sector with RedT. However RedT have not done well and the civil service's manta is to not pick 'winning' technology thereby leaving it to the AIM market to decide if VRFB technology is a go-er or not. Somewhat lazy and unwise if you ask me.
2) The recently established Faraday Institution (£274M) has focused itself on Lithium-ion type cell research that is applicable for transport applications. This is because it is run by precisely the consortium of universities that you would expect (Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, UCL, Imperial, Newcastle and Southampton) who are focussed on the fiendishly difficult task of making Lithium-ion batteries work for longer. My information is that the Redox Flow research was given the cold shoulder after having been invited to participate in various 'networking' opportunities.
The structural problem that the UK faces here is that it possesses no dedicated layer of commercially applicable research institutes, unlike the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany. This means that it is left to the universities to drive the approaches to government for funding and so there is generally relatively short term projects, slavered over by a university sector increasingly slavering over fancy-glass-look-at-us-buildings, but not work of a commercially transformative nature. Unlike the UK university system that generates IP paper tigers the Fraunhofer institutes in Germany are not permitted to hold onto their IP and so must instead push their research out into their industrial sector. In VRFBs this has led to the development of the all-welded power stacks and extruded bipolar plates by Fraunhofer UMSICHT and Volterion and new power stacks by Fraunhofer ICT /Schmalz and 2m2 power stacks from Fraunhofer ISE and ThyssenKrupp
3) There has been strong funding for Liquid-Air/Cryogenic energy storage since 2012 - Isentropic received £14m of public funding in 2012 and Highview power seem to have received multiple grants, now totalling over £10m. Earlier this year BEIS launched a competition for £20m for 'Storage at Scale' (https://www.edie.net/news/8/Government-launches-new-funding-measures-to-target-energy-storage-and-AI-innovations/) - I don't think the results are published yet, but I do not hold out much hope for VRFB's, well it will have to be RedT, getting much of a look in here.
Just reading through Septembers issue of The Economist paper entitled ‘The Climate Issue’. Interesting article on offshore-wind developments in Britain and forecasts leading up to 2030/50.
Although I was a little surprised to read, and I quote:
“As Britain aims for net-zero, it must also grapple with the broader challenge of balancing the grid. This year the Committee on Climate Change suggested that offshore wind capacity may reach a staggering 75GW in 2050. The would require about 180 of today’s biggest turbines to be installed in each of the next 30 years. Generating that much more power from intermittent sources will need investment in technology that does not yet exist, including batteries that can store power for weeks”
-end quote.
The point of concern being "... investment in technology that does not yet exist...".
Is this another case of VRFBs still being overlooked? Or am I misreading this? If the former perhaps one of our knowledgeable bushwhackers can put the editor right!