Member Info for Alfacomp

CowboyInvestor - I would guess that they simply got the amount of Vanadium Pentoxide confused with the amount of Vanadium.

8275 tonnes of V2O5 would be 4634 Tonnes of Vanadium - at 4,500 TonnesV per GWh this would equate to close to 1GWh energy storage. It is not clear what energy capacity the Cleve Hill battery is but if it is 350MW then 1GWh seems like it might be reasonable.

as the DoE Energy Storage Systems committee reported last year UL950A "evaluates the fire characteristics of a battery energy storage system that undergoes thermal runaway. The data generated can be used to determine the fire and explosion
protection required for an installation of a battery energy storage system."

It is not a general rubber stamp that you can put on the side of a product to assert that it is 'safe'

UL9540A is a "Test Method for Evaluating Thermal Runaway Fire Propagation in Battery Energy Storage" - it is not a standard though many people are talking as if it is and if you look at the title you will see it is pretty much irrelevant to VRFB's

this piece of paper does not make Lithium-ion battery cells any safer it only defines a test for evaluating them when they do fail.

if you are referring to the recent expert panel on CNBC he was talking hypothetically about how mining companies in general may respond to the pandemic, not purely about BMN

jogj99 - 'independent investors' is a positive thing - it is designed to demonstrate that the technology is what is called 'bankable' rather than some kind of ego project for the chief exec. Furthermore it allows Vametco to use its money to expand production, and keeping assets off the balance sheet also reduces the tax bill. Other mines will see this and immediately get it.

Mkx007 - with a posting history as long as yours you should be able to get your head around the fact that the current share price may not instantly and accurately reflect company fundamentals so you should also leave yourself enough intellectual flexibility to posit that changes in the share price also do not necessarily have to reflect any changes in the company fundamentals.

James the planning documents for the Cleve Hill enquiry make it quite clear that they are intent on using Lithium-ion batteries. The round-trip efficiency of Lithium ion is often touted at more that 90% but this does not take into account the cooling requirements for the Lithium-ion system so that system round-trip efficiency is actually much closer to 86%. This compares with RTE's for VRFB of >75% so there is not that much in it at the end of the day.

This compares with system RTE's for both green Hydrogen and CAES of less than 50%. The loss of energy for VRFB is less than half of those other technologies.

the thing about those fires is that they are not like standard fires which can be put out by simply excluding oxygen from the environment they are more like explosives in that they everything that they need to react already there and in intimate proximity. So trying to exclude oxygen does nothing and in fact can make the situation worse if by, for example, covering in sand, you simply keep the heat trapped inside the burning, melting, reacting mass of lithium and organofluorosphate - that is the stuff that produces the HF gas and close analogues to the nerve agent sarin.

Nonsense they sent me an email about it as a shareholder.

no YTSS there are no 'issues' with BMN, only with those that simply swing trade the share.

ohh dear yellowF1 you are so badly researched you are actually dangerous.

"(Sodium sulphur batteries - the ones made by NGK) don't present any fire risks" ... ?

perhaps you should tell that to the crew that spent 2 days putting the 200kW Sodium-Sulphur blaze in Oyama out or perhaps the other fire crew who spent over 2 weeks putting out the fire that consumed 24 Tonnes of Sulphur and 12 tonnes of Sodium in the NGK battery fire at Ibaraki.

In your ludicrous attempts to cast around for any other technology to try and bash VRFBs with you have literally picked one of the demonstrably most dangerous technologies and claimed that it has no fire risk. I think that you had better stop posting now as you are just making yourself look like a prize parsnip.

... and phase 2 of the Hubei system which is 500MWh

then there is the Dalian 800MWh phase 1 of which will be switched on later this year ...

here is one for starters Mkx007 - https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/11/1690630/0/en/VRB-Energy-Completes-Commissioning-of-Phase-1-of-the-Hubei-Zaoyang-10MW-40MWh-Utility-Scale-Solar-and-Storage-Integration-Demonstration-Project.html

MKx007 - as you have raised the question of last year's power outage as that (and VRFBs) is something I know a reasonable amount about. That particular outage was caused primarily by a technical fault at Little barford gas fired power station and then a subsequent disconnection of the Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm. These disconnections took a total of about 1.4GW generation offline for roughly 6 minutes.

The total additional energy needed to see the grid through this outage would therefore have been only 140MWh. Furthermore CAES such as undertaken by Highview would not have been able to respond rapidly enough to deal with the initial slew rate in the grid frequency, but a VRFB can go to 100% in only a few milliseconds so is easily up to the task of providing FFR (firm frequency response - fast energy balancing essentially) as it will be when installed at the Oxford Superhub and also as potentially in other large european countries.

that's it from me for the rest of the week. If you want me I'll be on twitter.

The question of whether a VRFB membrane can be improved is perhaps a moot point - sure you can probably make some super-duper membrane that works slightly better, but if it's only you going to be using it is going to be horribly expensive. The really clever thing about VRFBs is that it the same chemical on both sides of the battery so you don't have to worry about diffusion of species across the sell and as a result you can get away with pretty much any membrane that can stand up to the acid solution. Rongke power in fact make their own cheapo membranes so that the don't have to pay Chemours (ex Dupont) to use Nafion like what most other people use.

it's got nothing to do with flow batteries. Flow batteries do use graphitised felts and bipolar plates in their electrodes, because they conduct electricity without reacting chemically with the quite strong acids present.

Graphene is nothing but a single layer of graphite so technically we are actually already using it (graphene) but we do not need to buy anything from anyone who claims they are making 'graphene' - our graphitised felts are simply made in kg quantities by making felts of fibres such as cellulose which is then heated (not in air) to temperatures of >2000 deg C to carbonise and then graphitise the material eg see this:- https://www.sglcarbon.com/en/markets-solutions/material/sigratherm-soft-felt/

The membrane in a flow battery does not have any graphite/graphene in it and would not benefit from adding any.

where are those discussions and what specifically are they claiming ?

notsosmartmart - the safety documents submitted to the numerous enquiry meetings clearly indicate that the Cleve Hill project is going to use Lithium-ion batteries - though they try and keep as quiet as possible in the public media because of the obvious safety concerns about Lithium-ion technology.

Both the Faversham residents and anyone looking in here is going to be disappointed if they think after all that battling the developers are suddenly going to change the technology that they have just spent the last 2 years telling everyone was safe. Unfortunately history shows that it may take a major disaster like Grenfell to teach that safety lesson. If they are smart they will only go for a smaller battery to keep their options open for the future.

Once the Oxford superhub project demonstrates to everyone that VRFB's can do all the heavy cycling whilst the poor delicate Lithium-ion sits at the back of the site only being able to charge less than once a day then the economic penny will drop - if the VRFB is the system that is earning all the money from providing FFR balancing services then why don't we simply expand the storage capacity of the VRFB by just building a bigger electrolyte tank and in one fell swoop completely eliminate the Lithium-ion and its safety challenges entirely. Once VRFB's prove themselves to be essential as part of a hybrid battery storage system it only then takes simple economic arguments for them to fully take over the entire job. The lithium is only included at this stage as it is a technology that battery project financiers are already comfortable with.