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indeed combine the timelapse images that you can get from that with the latest google map (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uis,+Namibia/@-21.2364178,14.8798745,741m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x1b8982c1554e71f5:0xce3e792c0ae6a91a!8m2!3d-21.2186578!4d14.8673531 ) and you can get a better idea of what is going on.

You can see trucks moving material from the mining face to a region beside the processing plant (the stuff they want) and a new triangular waste tip just to the south of this (this is slightly greyer material which I am assuming is the overburden being stripped).

the end result of this discussion is that only in the worst case scenario or an undrained stack is there any self-discharge in a VRFB - even in that case it is only the electrolyte that is stuck in the stack that would be affected and this is a tiny fraction of the overall electrolyte. So BE were simply quoting the very worst case figure they could find so as they were being conservative or didn't want to get involved in complex caveating whether the VRFB stack is drained or not.

Having said that as I've explained it is a non issue because you're unlikely to be keeping a VRFB fully charged for more than a couple of days - you're certainly not going to be keeping it charged for months at a time waiting for an overcast day.

Indeed 1210 - the typical way in which a grid scale or commercial and industrial (C&I) battery would operate would be as a grid-tied asset which can charge from the grid once or twice a day or as an isolated system connected to a PV system when 1 charge per day would be the best you could get. The VRFB's may be long-duration storage in that they may have capacities of 4-10 hours which is long in that it is longer than the 1 hour typical of Lithium-ion cells.

This is not to be confused with long-term energy storage - which is the kind of thing that you would want to be able to deal with interseasonal rather than intra-day peak shifting. Here the interseasonal energy storage system is charged and discharged once per year. Which such a low rate of usage it would take any electrochemical battery a few millenia to pay for itself, even if you could charge it up in the summer and retain all the charge until the winter.

A battery is not the right sort of technology for that application - instead a relatively expensive machine that can convert cheap raw materials from one low energy form into another easily storable higher energy form is the sort of thing that would be required. Better still if the higher energy form can be used in transportation systems as a movable energy store that you can easily ferry around - so perhaps ethanol or ammonia before methane and hydrogen.

Indeed those numbers from Drifter88 seem very high to me.

As reteps says there should be essentially zero loss in energy when the electrolyte in the tanks is kept separate and away from one another - this self-discharge figure will only be for the electrolyte that is sitting inside the power stacks. Some VRFB systems automatically drain the power stacks back to the storage tanks when they are not running - this then naturally eliminates any self-discharge of the electrolyte that is in the power stacks. The only downside to doing this is that it then takes some time to fill the stacks (10 seconds ?) before being able to switch the battery back on - it depends then on whether your battery is intended to provide fast frequency response services (sub 10s) to the grid or not, as to whether you can operated with the self-draining stack design or not.

There is of course no option with Lithium-ion to optimise anything like this to reduce self-discharge.

UKsteveg - that is only the Ferrovanadium price - the Vanadium Pentoxide and even more so the Ammonium Metavanadate prices in China have risen strongly in the last week and Asian Metal shows FeV prices in china already above $30. That website you quoted seems somewhat out of date.

UKsteveg - it is a good thing then that Vanadium prices have recently risen to their highest point in a year - that is not exactly stagnation is it ?

now is the time to buy shares, as I just have

DarrylJ - no an inflection point is simply the point where a curve changes its curvature (eg from curving up to down and v-v)

I think that a much more dramatic effect will happen - namely a discontinuous change in gradient upwards reflecting that the world suddenly 'gets' that VRFB's are huge, safe, and now, here.

ComboyInvestor and mogwhy you are correct

Terry Perles has a good graph that shows the supply curve for Vanadium - that will show the price point at which each source of Vanadium can come online. You will note that we are very close to the bottom of that list - i.e. the lowest production cost, whilst a lot of Vanadium sl-a-g reprocessing only becomes profitable at prices above where we are now.

I cannot find that slide right now, but here is another interesting one - on page 3 of this :- https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6668501914923130880/ this shows China Vanadium exports significantly reducing in the last quarter of last year, and in fact crossed over into nett importation of V. Can anyone guess what this might be due to ?

Well by all accounts the Gigha project was very badly handled but that was before the point I really started paying much interest in VRFB's - I've heard about it though from other people in the Energy Storage industry and at the IFBF.

The killer for me was that they paid so little attention to their source of Vanadium that they didn't even bother coming to the Vanitec meetings on the subject of VRFB's - that made a deep impression on me.

faramog - with respect they were done over by the Vanadium price. I witnessed the previous RedT CEO meeting with Fortune and Mikhail at one of the Vanitec meetings and it was evident that they had never met before. That was about 2 years after Mikhail took over the chairmanship of the Vanitec Energy Storage Committee. I made a mental note at precisely that point to make sure that I did not accidentally buy any shares in RedT at any point.

The situation is completely different and I have bought some IES shares precisely because of this. Note I did not have to sell any BMN shares to do this as I was able to cash in other investments.

yep it is really great to find out what stockopedia thinks

"Bushveld Minerals is a player in the Uranium sector "

Sharesahoy - the relationship with UET has not ever been precisely defined. BMN can take VRFBs from anyone they like, they and BNM are pretty much in the driving seat of the industry now.

Furthermore Lithium-ion batteries are eminently knickable. VRFBs are not, there is no black market for highly acidic electrolyte, unlike lithium-ion batteries where you can rip them apart to get at the individual lithium-ion cells.

Bolong New Materials - Rongke Power's sister company.

faramog - sorry I didn't answer the second part of that question - BNM are no doubt making the electrolyte

I have been led to believe by Industry analysts that I am not at liberty to reveal that the Vanadium for the Dalian battery came has come from outside of China

Endion - the LCOS reduction is perhaps not quite as big a factor as 2 because the second charge-discharge cycle may have a smaller price differential between charge and discharge so you might not get as much revenue for the second charge, but it depends on how batteries are getting reimbursed, which in turn depends on the regulations of the country that you are sitting in and consequently also which can change at the drop of a bureaucrat or politician's hat.

This is why LCOS numbers are something of a movable feast and not the only way to value one energy storage technology in one country against another perhaps somewhere else. This is perhaps why Lazard are no longer publishing LCOS comparison tables by technology as of their latest LCOS review - as they may implicitly accept that the LCOS methodology should not be the only way of comparing ES technologies.

Brad - I think that VRFB rollout this year is going to cause long term structural demand for Vanadium, bigly.