Member Info for Alfacomp

Daisydog - the fact that Evraz sold Nitrovan at effectively the same price per V-atom as FeV was told to me by someone very high up in Vametco manufacturing. This was because at the time Evraz also sold FeV from their Highveld operation - furthermore when they were doing this they were sweetening the ore mined at Vametco with V-sla-g taken from Highveld and so were not bothered about getting Vametco to run purely on its own ore.

The fact that Bushveld HAVE managed to get Vametco to run on its own ore alone is a testament to their skill.

The question was ‘why is it so quiet?’ And my theory is that people are on holiday.

is it so quiet today here when Vanadium prices are the highest they have been in the last 2 years, and still going up ?

With respect to Paulo they don't pump electrolyte through a membrane in VRFB.

With respect to Fortune both he and Mikhail have been saying exactly the same about the market for VRFBs for the last 2 years at least - they were both saying it to the analysts when we visited the mine and Eskom battery test centre back in 2019:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/eskom-battery-site-visit-410

the video there:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku3tWoA4688 shows what I'm guessing is a 6kW VRFB power stack. This is larger than the 2.5kW one I am pictured holding in this article:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-416

Other 6kW power stacks from other manufacturers weigh over 50Kg so it is truly remarkable that one person can lift this stack into position. I have to agree with the awarders of the Fraunhofer prize - this really is a remarkable innovation in Flow battery stack construction.

Well, well, well who would have guessed it - seems that increased demand from Europe as it gets back to work making steel cars means that there's less Vanadium around for everyone else. Ohhh, that and the fact that we're going to be sending hundreds of tonnes through our own electrolyte processing plants. Plus I wonder how much other Vanadium we're supplying to other people for their own electrolyte manufacturing. We don't have a Joint Venture with Invinity to make electrolyte in the UK for no reason.

The continued increase in Vanadium prices is only increasing the disconnect between SP and the fundamental progress the company is making. The South African government has now taken the brakes off of self-generation for industrial use and so BMN is in the prime position to pick up 100's of MWh of VRFB battery storage projects.

At some point the spring will snap and the SP will quickly move back above 20p as the MMs realise there are punters desperate to buy back in rather than punters being forced to sell shares to pay their bills.

Another day above USD 33,000 per tonne of Tin.

Pickler - a lot can happen in 5 months

pb940 - Andy Colthorpe of Energy Storage News sounding the most positive about VRFB's I have ever heard him sound.

a pretty solid update there. It is worth remembering that this yields around 3.5M USD revenue PER QUARTER and that around the end of the year it will be almost 6M USD per quarter.

that guy is a well known fossil fuel campaigner

https://d1jbg4la8qhw2x.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Blom-ESI-2018-4-19-2.pdf

12,500 tonnes of V2O5 at USD 8.89/lb revenue would be 111 million USD per year. Thus you can easily see the energy storage side of the business adding at least 1 Billion USD valuation to the company - probably somewhere between 2 and 3 Billion if fair PE multipliers are applied.

3% of 50 GWh is 1.5GWh which would require approximately 7000 Tonnes of Vanadium (about 12,500 Tonnes of V2O5)

see https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/lionels-big-picture-428

Halespur - I cannot see it being of great interest in the VRFB electrode context because the acid nature of the electrolyte solution would not work with the aluminium. In the context of other renewables devices then there's obviously situation where the weight of motor windings is an issue - wind turbines, aeroplane electrical motors, cars potentially even - but there's a long way between making small amounts of a composite in the lab and replacing an industry based on heavily drawn magnet wire which has been made from copper for the last 200 years.

I'm always highly dubious about any article with graphene in it because it is a word so often overused and misused by university promotional departments. Without seeing any real numeric data I cannot comment on what they claim. Many people can get improvements of 100% on a poor power stack setup, eg by simply tightening the bolts on the felt electrodes a bit more.

The general point is that there is a lot that can be optimised and a lot that can be improved, as really there's still a lot of technical and economic optimisation to come in VRFBs

numpty - as always I have no idea what you are posting about, but I do like it, it's fun, and you've got a good pen.

that's a great interview fb - I listened to it earlier on. Thank god and Ramaphosa that they have got someone with their head properly screwed on in charge of Eskom

HarChris the original complaint was cherry picked to try and create a narrative of 'yet another missed target by fortune, the company needs to stop doing this' etc etc.

As I clearly pointed out the target was reassessed within a prompt time-scale and with around a year before the original 'target-date'. This no doubt happened in light of the events and opportunities on the ground. No doubt Fortune was surprised by the incredible Vanadium prices that abounded at the end of 2018 - I know I and everyone here at the time was. Whilst this would have come as a pleasant surprise to us it came as a terrible shock to VRFB manufacturers such RedT, Enerox/Cellcube and even Rongke power.

What this meant is that Fortune and the company's opportunity to snap up/help up outfits such as RedT, Avalon and Enerox came much sooner than he could ever have predicted. This no doubt forced him to reassess the speed of expansion of Vametco production, balancing it with the need to maintain downstream VRFB production capacity and help maintain the nascent VRFB industry.

I for one am very happy that Fortune is constantly reassessing his plans and if this means that occasionally short term targets have to be changed in order that the long term strategic goals are better achieved then so be it. I admire a company with that level of pragmatism. It is one of the reasons I invested in BMN the company and Fortune and Mikhail the men - because they CAN actually see the wood for the trees.

To expect every single stated target to be reached and achieved at the moment originally stated and without consideration of facts on the grounds would not only be unreasonable it would be downright undesirable, especially in the fast moving and world changing business of global energy storage that we are in. This after all is not simply a run of the mill company producing cookie-cutter houses or selling insurance policies.

Snott - thank you for the compliment