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Rich Ken thanks for the reply. I wrote to BE prior to us having any potential tie up with REDT so did not consider them as a contact point, in fact at that point I thought that they had gone bust.
Also I confess I don't know a great deal about RED,'s product, however I believe it is suitable in scale for household purposes? This would be too small a unit for airfield UPS systems connected to safety systems, I would guess (lighting, ground based navigation systems, communication etc).
My letter to BE was aimed at providing a VRFB solution to power a whole airport, not just back up UPS, this, in some cases, is the power consumption of a town. I believe the market potential for VRFB from airports is huge.
I will contact RED next month and suggest they contact the ministers responsible for energy and transport in the Scottish government regarding the above.
Bonscott you would be best to contact REDT in the UK, don’t forget we have a VIP investment with the Avalon/RedT partnership and a vanadium electrolyte lease agreement.
RedT are known and authorised by the UK government for Energy Storage.
That is certainly the best opportunity today for UK businesses to purchase VRFB technology. In future of course it could be others too.
Cheers RK
BonScott. Maybe email the Scottish government as well. Or whoever in the government has the job.
Airports are also heavily reliant on UPS for safety systems. Mostly diesel generators in my experience. The Scottish government have recently declared a policy of aviation in the Highlands to be carbon neutral in the future . I emailed BE suggesting contacting Highlands and Islands Airports Group to potentially tie up with the Scottish government to supply VRFB, as a showcase, for a ground based carbon neutral aviation. As yet I am waiting for a reply from BE.
@pbm, Current conventional UPS systems are very short duration 5-20mins and used to buy time to fire up backup generators. One of the biggest problems with them is the often only get used when being tested, usually annually so you don't always get the result you want when you need it. The best UPS would be one that is known to be in use regularly, daily even. VRFBs could easily be configured to be dual role, both saving costs by utilising only low cost or self generated electricity and being available to provide power for an outage. We're still looking at hours of outage though rather than minutes. Paired batteries, one charging while the other is discharging would go a long way to solve this. The sites that need this level of resilience may start considering VRFBs now that costs have come down, e.g. military, data centres, hospitals etc.
Also my assumption. An uninterrupted power supply or UPS? If so there are many other types of business that need UPS; Data centres, hospitals etc....would be interested in reading thoughts of those here better qualified than me about VRFB potential in context of UPS.
Here’s to a blue Thursday.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I assumed that the minigrid would be used as backup for when blackouts strike, as this is such a problem in South Africa. You can't make money when your machinery is out of action for a few hours at random times.
What times are the shifts at Vametco?
ie will staff be there at any point after dark? (5:30 in winter?)
I'm still struggling with the idea that a battery can wash it's face as an arbitrage play on energy prices coming from the grid, plus a bit of TRIAD avoidance (or SA equivalent). The difference between peak and non-peak would have to be massive after accounting for roundtrip efficiency.
I suppose if anyone can get their hands on a cheap VFRB, it's BMN!
Plus it’s expandable to make it power the majority of the plant if required.
They obviously wanted only 1MW due to regulations at the time.
Now they should hopefully lift and allow a larger mini-grid Which is my understanding.
Whatever the size if it’s scalable, all the other mines and businesses will be interested.
Understood, much appreciated Alfa.
jonny - the 1MW minigrid with 1MW/4MWh battery, although it would potentially only power 8% of the mine's power needs at any point might actually make much more of a saving than that - how ? By charging and discharging twice a day it can reduce the peaks of power that may be drawn from the eskom grid, which might not only reduce 1) peak capacity charges which may be incurred if a peak is only reached for 1 second a month but also 2) smooth out demand such that cheap electricity is taken from the grid at night to charge the battery before it is discharged during the morning followed by a recharge during the peak sunlight hours and subsequent discharge in the late afternoon and evening. It could be that different per unit pricing is applied at all of these times, and yes we'll only be using eskom electricity when it is cheapest.
What is the business case for the battery at Vametco?
Appreciate with any cap lifted they could ramp up the solar installation but previous plans for 1MW barely put a dent in demand so seems unlikely they couldn't use all of the energy as generated.
Perhaps although unaffected by recent rolling blackouts they couldn't guarantee that would be true going forward? Or is the battery at Vametco just a loss-leading demonstration?