Member Info for Alfacomp

and there's another one

2x 100K at 20.45p

100K at 20.25p plus 50K + 49,206 at 20.37p

Can you see what went on here, it's happened a number of times over the last few days - rollovers processed at below the mid-price point so as to appear as more sells than they really are.

yep known as ESS in the industry

Given that Professor Huamin Zhang is the founder of Rongke Power and it is commonly known that they, Rongke power make their own membrane (so that they are not reliant on Dupont Nafion) I think it is highly likely.

ESS you mean - they seem to use Iron Chloride and claim that 'traditional flow batteries' only have medium energy capacity potential.

Perhaps they have not heard of the 800MWh Dalian VRFB

Sorry that article is nonsense

"Although the low temperature required to produce vanadium dioxide metal is impressive, what really makes it exciting is the fact that it conducts electricity without producing any waste heat."

This is not the description of the wiedmann-franz law which relates the thermal conductivity to the electrical conductivity, instead it is a description of superconductor, which Vanadium dioxide is NOT.

kevkan - it is called the madness of crowds and is worth avoiding

jimbo66 - yes that is exactly what I concluded yesterday. Had the 330K and 360K both been sells that would have given the MMs a haul of 870K shares - which, had that been their game, I'm sure would have happened at lower prices.

so what can one actually buy with the 61 pence that someone got by selling 3 shares this morning. Suggestions ?

enough to buy a Mars bar these days ?

Just asking for a member of parliament.

Following on from this, and back to the comparison between Lithium-ion and VRFBs these are the numbers from the US DoE Hydrowires report based upon 4 hour duration batteries:

Lithium-ion : Total project build cost $469/kWh of which $271 is the battery, $100 Balance of Plant, $101 Construction and Commisioning

VRFB: Total project build cost $858/kWh of which $555 is the battery, $100 Balance of Plant and $190 Construction and Commissioning.

I believe that they have quoted a high price for construction and commissioning of the VRFB because they have undertaken only rather limited research into real VRFB manufacturer's prices. I quote from section 4.3.4.2 on VRFBs "Due to lack of information and reliability for O&M costs, the same O&M costs were used across all battery technologies as mentioned previously"

Just comparing the build cost $271/kWh (Li-ion) and $555/kWh (VRFB) is of course only half the story - we need to take into account the different lifetimes of the two technologies. They quote Li-ion 3,500 cycles versus VRFB 10,000 - so despite the VRFB system initially costing twice the Li-ion one it last three times as long so is already cost-competitive.

Skip forward and only two months after that Hydrowires paper was published we have Cellcube/Enerox quoting $200/kWh :-

"on an eight-hour storage duration system we’re at the price point of US$200 per kWh. Not battery, not cell, no fancy announcement on the battery cell level, but for system-level containerised energy storage: US$200. "

(https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/cellcubes-highly-vertical-ambitions-for-long-duration-redox-flow-batteries )

We've already seen that eight-hour storage is not some crazy outlier application - it is actually THE application that by itself (260GWh) is potentially 20 times the size of the two-hour battery storage market (14 GWh).

Make no mistake things are going to get pretty interesting around here this year.

Vauxhall Viva - all the points that you make are generally good ones but arguing that Lithium-ion batteries are not cost-effective for stationary energy storage when clearly they are being installed at significant scale (and they can't ALL be loss leaders) clearly cannot be correct.

The key thing to remember is that energy storage will be used to displace peaker plants that are used much less than most other normal power plants. If we take the figures from Thomas Bischof-Niemz's book 'South Africa's Energy Transition' we get the following prices (as used in the 2016 IRP)

Solar PV - Levelised cost of energy (LCOE) = 0.62 R/kWh , Wind is very similar
Coal - 1.03 - 1.47 R/kWh
Gas Peaking plant - 2.26 R/kWh
Diesel Peaking Plant - 3.07 R/kWh

The reason that the peaking plants are so much more expensive is that they are only used 10% of the time - so you have all the costs of building the station and manning it and maintaining it, but you only get 10% of the kWh out of it that you could have.

3.07 R/kWh works out at 213 USD/MWh so more than 4 times the $50/MWh you were thinking of for a UK baseload consumption rate.

It gets better for the batteries as they eat into the peaker market as the existing peaker plants get used less and less and then the effective marginal rate for the electricity from them becomes higher and higher. Instead of running a mix of Gas and Diesel peakers at 5% it then makes more sense to entirely shut down all the Diesel ones and switch to just Gas peakers and batteries. This way the batteries can get a foothold against the most expensive peakers first before starting to eat into the next tier of technology, the gas peakers. This is what makes batteries, even lithium-ion ones which may only last for 3,500 cycles, attractive even now.

Sorry to keep this thread going but the idea that all the low hanging fruit will be gone soon and the opportunity will 'become less lucrative' is I believe very far from the truth.

If you read this paper from June 2019 "The Potential for Battery Energy Storage to Provide Peaking Capacity in the United States "- https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/74184.pdf - you will see that we have not really even got started on mid-duration (2-8 hours) energy storage. As the PV component of energy being supplied to the grid increases with time (it is only 2.5% in the US at present) the situation, oft-referred to as the 'duck-curve' only gets worse and worse.

Lithium is good for short term frequency regulation - as that paper outlines the potential 'regulating reserve requirement in the United States' is perhaps only 7 GW - so yes perhaps that function will become congested with Lithium-ion batteries that are getting cycled hard and perhaps replaced every 5 years. (So if we ascribe a 2 hour max duration to these there might be 14 GWh of this short-duration storage needed for the US)

However as that report makes abundantly clear the potential for medium duration storage is sooo much greater.

At 2.5% PV penetration they estimate that they might need

28GW of 4 hour batteries = 112GWh
12 GW of 6 hour batteries = 72 GWh
35 GW of 8 hour batteries = 280 GWh

Total = 464 GWh = 33 times the amount of energy capacity needed for short-duration functions.

The sweet spot for VRFBs is 4-8 hours, so which technology do you think is going to clear up this application ?

Vauxhall Viva - you cannot simply do a calculation like the one you are doing. The people who run the grid need to have flexibility. Nuclear doesn't give you that, nor does coal, or PV or wind, open cycle gas peakers do but at the cost of poor efficiency and rather low utilisation rates. Batteries can provide many services to allow the grid people to balance the grid - this is what is called service stacking so a simple calculation like the one you described does not capture that.

To do the calculation properly you need to know the menu of balancing services that the battery is going to provide, the payment structure for the market in which you are going to install it, the cost of capital, the battery technology and degradation/maintenance costs. This all goes in to produce the Lowest Cost of Storage (LCOS) as per Lazards calculations and is as a result a very complicated calculation.

The simple fact is that grid scale Lithium-ion batteries ARE being built and the costs ARE similar to that outlined in the 120 page hydrowires report put out by the US DoE in July 2019. If you want to argue about where they get those figures from then section 4.3.2 is where you should start.

Thanks Pdub, but I would also like to thank Vauxhall Viva for drawing this thread out - grid storage and home storage really need to be thought of quite differently.

Firstly energy stored in batteries is not sold at the same time and same price as other energy sources. It is provided at precisely the times when other energy sources cannot do it, hence can be provided at a premium price. Remember that the strike price for Hinkley C is actually $134/kWh (converted to USD and adjusted for the fact that was 2012 dollars) - and that IS being built right now. That is a factor of more than 2.5 your quoted number.

Secondly the people who run the grid have an option if they don't want to install batteries. They can build a power station which runs only 5 times a year. That is of course hugely inefficient and expensive, but that is the choice that they face. Hence they would rather have a battery that can also act as an energy sink when you need it AND can provide energy with no fuel cost AND can help stabilise the grid frequency when everyone turns their kettles on or off.

Your calculations, based upon a model that might be applicable for a homeowner, are NOT applicable to someone who has to run the grid. If they screw up then they are officially hung, drawn and quartered, so making sure that they have energy storage available for short term frequency regulation (so they do not step outside their officially mandated frequency window which the grid must maintain at all times to keep operating) or mid term energy storage (eg a bit like a gas peaker to deal with 15-60 min peaks) is much more highly valued than you have considered.

If you really wish to understand the multiple applications that grids have for energy storage, and the multiple different ways in which they are currently paying for them to be built, you need to read up on some of the applications described here:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-414 - for example you will see that only VRFB and Hydrogen Energy Storage can be used for all 12 of the listed applications, though Lithium-ion does quite well too.

I guess you should take the point up with the US department of Energy who produced that report

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%20Cost%20and%20Performance%20Characterization%20Report_Final.pdf

What makes you think that nobody is investing in battery storage at that price ?

You realise of course that the build capex cost and LCOS are completely different.

Vauxhall Viva - any price point of less than $200 per kWh for Lithium ion is just for the cells not for the entire system with the cells formed into modules, with cooling systems and control and the filtering that is needed on them.

The US hydrowires report (July 2019 - Energy Storage Technology and Cost Characterization Report ) quotes 2018 full Lithium-ion battery build costs as $469/kWh

scotscout - it is not published because it is negotiated behind closed doors between Vanadium suppliers, Electrolyte Producers and VRFB manufacturers. Suffice it to say it is not going to be less than the cost of the input Vanadium and sulphuric acid, and more likely is going to be something like double those input costs.

I remember chatting with Dr Peter Fischer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Chemical Technology, who with his small team of about 15 people, has built one of Europe's largest VRFBs (20MWh - https://www.ict.fraunhofer.de/en/comp/ae/rw.html ) - he told me that he struggled to get the published V market spot price for the 200 tonnes of Vanadium Pentoxide that he needed to make his own electrolyte with - quite simply you can negotiate a long term supply arrangement with a Vanadium producer if you are prepared to buy 200 tonnes a year for 10 years, but not if you just want it once off.

This is the problem that all VRFB manufacturers faced at one point in time.

It seems that BMN and BE worked this out a long time ago and have patiently spent the last 4 years helping to solve that problem.