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The UT trade of 2,000 at 24.0p on friday afternoon (strangely repeated 6 seconds later) has masked the clear moves up that the SP has made over the last 3 days of trading. This trend has continue this morning and I expect a tick up should the excess of buying continue.

Nice one maroonbells - now we really must have a chat

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/redt-open-energi-clinch-maiden-vanadium-flow-grid-services-pre-qualification

Well said RichKen

Might they be encumbered by being loaned to someone who is shorting BMN ?

In the last three week Vaneck's REMX holding of Largo has dropped by 5%, but their 4.9M holding of BMN has not changed at all despite them having removed BMN from their own administered RE index.

I think they made a mistake when they removed BMN from their REMX Rare Earth and Strategic metals index, have now realised the error of their ways, and will be looking to put BMN back in at the first opportunity they can.

Playerone - I suggest that you either try and get a little more sleep, or do a bit more research, or ask your friends in Doncaster.

thanks for letting us know beginerman.

Indeed Ophidian I have to concur on all points - it is indeed one of the great ironies/truths that the VRFB manufacturing sector picked up interest AFTER the UNSW patent expired in 2005. Up until that point only 2 or 3 companies had licenses for the technology and apart from Sumitomo they made relatively little progress on commercialising the technology. You could argue that this was too early in the lifecycle of the technology, or too early because Energy storage of renewables was not 'a thing' 15 years ago. But I would also argue that something only becomes an industry, with the organic development of its own ecosystem when the core technical requirement ceases to be controlled by the Intellectual Property office of one Laboratory or University.

Fortunately we have already gone through this stage with VRFBs and now have a collection of VRFB manufacturing and support companies that is on the verge of establishing itself as an industry. Anything invented tomorrow would be 10 years too late for the Energy storage revolution.

Supdawg - wrt the original question " I don't mean to be defeatist, but I'd love to hear thoughts regarding us being clear that such a material is unlikely to be found / synthesised" - you must surely know already that Vanadium is the only elemental species that can exist in aqueous solution in 4 different oxidation states ? It is precisely this feature that allows a Vanadium flow battery, and only a Vanadium flow battery , to be manufactured with EXACTLY the same electrolyte on both sides of the battery. This means that any leakage or diffusion across the power stack dividing membrane has not long-term deleterious effect on the battery.

On the subject of patience Pdub I am currently down in London at the science museum and as the others have gone off to twiddle knobs and press buttons I have taken myself off to the clock museum exhibit. Observing John Harrison’s (he of ‘longitude’ fame) double compensated pendulum clock mechanism I am reminded that to achieve anything of any great importance takes a huge amount of patience, dedication, and outright thick-skinnedness in the face of criticism from those who don’t yet understand what you are doing. I think that with our combined steel+vrfb vanadium interests Fortune has built an almost perfectly balanced vanadium production business. Along comes Mikhail to show us exactly what can be done with such a new instrument - chart a course for energy storage domination, wouldn’t you say Pdub

DD - sorry to hear that. I have not changed my opinion and have been taking advantage of the consolidation to acquire more shares at a time when there is clearly huge steps forward for both BMN and the wider VRFB market yet to be appreciated by the wider world. There is no doubt now that VRFB technology is going to have to be one of our key tools in the energy transition and battling climate change that is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell

The problem is that the only batteries that these guys know exists are the ones connected to a car factory. They are fairly desperate to bribe anyone who says that they wish to build cars in England though there is no guarantee that these could be exported without tariffs

Lindon, there are of course external processors of electrolyte that BE can pay to do the job for them.

Well following on from my question of whether RedT have negotiated a V-supply agreement with BMN it seems that they don't need to as Avalon already have such an agreement with BMN. With respect I think that the proposed merger is about the best that the employees and existing shareholders of RedT could have got.

when more than one person dies

"... cost them a lot of money to build the extra power stacks that they would need to get the power rating that they are turning to the Lithium-ion unit for " I might have said more clearly

gkb47 - my personal opinion, is that I am confused by their cobbling together, frankenstein-like, of a flow battery and a lithium-ion battery (note that the lithium-ion battery mentioned as part of the Oxford superhub is nothing to do with RedT, it's a separate thing altogether).

The traditional argument is 'flow for energy, but Lithium-ion for power' has been challenged recently by Volterion who have pointed out that the separation of the electrolyte from the power stacks means that a flow battery concept can scale up not just the energy at sublinear cost (eg double the energy does not cost double the amount) but also the same trick works with the power side of things - you want double the power, you can get it and you don't need to shell out for any more electrolyte, just more power stacks, and a bigger or more pumps).

Volterion have posited that there is not just a sweet spot for VRFBs at 2,3,4+ hrs duration but that they also win when you start thinking about high-power delivery, for short periods of time, ooohhhh like say, charging an eV, that you want to do dozens of times a day. The fact that VRFBs do not degrade with each charge means they can easily handle this challenge, whilst Lithium-ion batteries would be dead after a few months if they tried.

Ahhhh, but why does Lazard always get the Lowest Cost of Energy Storage lower for Lithium-ion than for VRFBs ? Answer, because they only ever do their calculate for a single charge-discharge cycle per day. In the 3D Energy/Power/Cycles per day space Lazard only ever lives in the flat earth of N=1. Allow N>5 and you suddenly discover that VRFBs win in not just a small part of the (N=1) E-P plane but all over it. I will work these ideas up into an article at some point as I think others might be interested in them, just a bit.

Alas I am getting away from the subject of RedT and why they would feel the need to bolt a lithium-ion battery onto their VRFB system. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that perhaps their power stacks are not very good and it would cost them a lot of money to build power stacks. Volterion on the other hand seem to have that problem licked.

gkb47 - the current prime minister is wrong to assert that the UK in any way leads the world in battery technology.

1) There is no large scale UK production of lithium-ion battery cells. There is not a single Lithium-ion "gigafactory" operating or planned for the UK. There are at least 8-10 planned for the rest of europe (https://www.euractiv.com/section/batteries/interview/europe-will-have-at-least-ten-gigantic-battery-factories/ ). With China already taking more that 60% of worldwide Lithium-ion cell production capacity (approx 180 GWh in 2018) - this would equate to approximately 5x Mr Musk's "Gigafactory" in Nevada (35GWh annual capacity). Overall there is current production of c. 9 gigafactories worth across the globe, set to double in the next 7 years.

2) Where are the profound UK contributions to battery research ? Sure the government is chucking a few hundred million quid to the Faraday Institute (headed by my old Cambridge associate Prof Peter Littlewood) and a consortium of around 10 of the richest UK universities, but that doesn't mean diddly squat. The amounts involved are trivial compared with the real research that is done on commercialising these devices and turning them into real products. Where are the UK based AIM/FTSE companies queuing up to give us new lithium-ion battery technology. Ahh no there aren't.

3) If we broaden the definition of battery to include those electrochemical types that do not require tyres and a steering wheel and which are not being researched by the Faraday Institute we come to flow batteries (V, Zn/Br, Fe/Cl etc) and high temperature molten sodium ones such as (Na-S, Na-Ni-Cl). The latter category can be ignored as they were popular 5 years ago but after a number of truly devastating fires they have become somewhat, er, niche. In fact General Electric appear to have completely given up on the Na-Ni-Cl ones. The eskom battery under test was already disappeared when I was there 'for repairs'.

3a) If we concentrate on flow batteries then it is clear that only the all Vanadium chemistries have a chance of achieving critical mass - if compare the UK (RedT) with Germany (Volterion, Schmid, Voltstorage, Fraunhofer ICT, Fraunhofer Umsicht, Power stacks from Schmalz and Thyssen-Krupp) or the US (UET, Avalon Battery, Vionx, Membranes from Membrion and Chemours) or Denmark (Visblue) then you can see the UK has all of its VRFB eggs in a single 5m quid basket. If the government wants to claim it is even in the VRFB race it needs to put 50M pounds into focussed industrial research and technology transfer instead of propping up an overinflated UK university sector.