RE: The Economist22 Sep 2019 18:20
magellaniccloud - the question of whether the UK policymakers understand what is needed for balancing the grid is one that I have spent the last 18 months trying to understand. They have been distracted, I know, but the August power cut will hopefully now be refocussing minds.
There are a number of structural issues which means that UK policymakers are blind to VRFBs:
1) they have heard of RedT, have provided it with BIS (previously the DTI) funding and are generally equate the entire VRFB sector with RedT. However RedT have not done well and the civil service's manta is to not pick 'winning' technology thereby leaving it to the AIM market to decide if VRFB technology is a go-er or not. Somewhat lazy and unwise if you ask me.
2) The recently established Faraday Institution (£274M) has focused itself on Lithium-ion type cell research that is applicable for transport applications. This is because it is run by precisely the consortium of universities that you would expect (Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, UCL, Imperial, Newcastle and Southampton) who are focussed on the fiendishly difficult task of making Lithium-ion batteries work for longer. My information is that the Redox Flow research was given the cold shoulder after having been invited to participate in various 'networking' opportunities.
The structural problem that the UK faces here is that it possesses no dedicated layer of commercially applicable research institutes, unlike the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany. This means that it is left to the universities to drive the approaches to government for funding and so there is generally relatively short term projects, slavered over by a university sector increasingly slavering over fancy-glass-look-at-us-buildings, but not work of a commercially transformative nature. Unlike the UK university system that generates IP paper tigers the Fraunhofer institutes in Germany are not permitted to hold onto their IP and so must instead push their research out into their industrial sector. In VRFBs this has led to the development of the all-welded power stacks and extruded bipolar plates by Fraunhofer UMSICHT and Volterion and new power stacks by Fraunhofer ICT /Schmalz and 2m2 power stacks from Fraunhofer ISE and ThyssenKrupp
3) There has been strong funding for Liquid-Air/Cryogenic energy storage since 2012 - Isentropic received £14m of public funding in 2012 and Highview power seem to have received multiple grants, now totalling over £10m. Earlier this year BEIS launched a competition for £20m for 'Storage at Scale' (https://www.edie.net/news/8/Government-launches-new-funding-measures-to-target-energy-storage-and-AI-innovations/) - I don't think the results are published yet, but I do not hold out much hope for VRFB's, well it will have to be RedT, getting much of a look in here.
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