Member Info for Alfacomp

I count around 9x 40kWh avalon batteries there - so 360kWh in all , marginally less than the 450kWh BE has on test with Eskom in a single 20 foot shipping container.

Martyboy - nothing on that particular front. I think that Bushveld Energy is starting at the other end of the Alphabet - First America, with Avalon.

Alchemyex - I see that someone has already recommended the bushveld perspective to you - perhaps you would like to comment on which article you found most interesting.

Was it the report on the visit to the Vametco mine earlier this year ? https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vametco-mine-visit-407

or the subsequent article that covered the processing side of the plant ?https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vametco-processing-plant-visit-408

or the visit to see the Bushveld Energy supplied VRFB battery on test with Eskom ? https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/eskom-battery-site-visit-410

or the report on the potential for VRFB penetration in the stationary energy storage market following the Dusseldorf Energy Storage Europe meeting ? https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-414
or the subsequent estimation of the multi-billion dollar worldwide market for stationary energy storage as part of the necessary decarbonisation that all nations will need to undertake ? https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-415

... one of the most high-profile of course, being South Africa itself, which currently has the world's highest GHG emission electricity and which needs to radically improve its grid efficiency and Renewables Integration via the provision of Worldbank backed massive Battery Energy Storage Systems (1,440 MWh for a start) ? https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/bushveld-energy-eskom-battery-mandate-2018-339

Am now back in the UK and following up on all the contacts made at the Vanitec/IFBF conferences - but where to start as there's so many of them. I may well produce something of interest in due course.

Pat48 - I would say not - they look like well behaved rollovers

Tyfoon - I don't think it really changes that much - their approach to using precipitation inhibitors to increase the concentration of dissolved Vanadium only really works on one side of the battery - so you could not immediately apply the technique to increase the energy density of an all Vanadium flow battery. And indeed why would you bother as the energy density of the Vanadium flow battery is not really the issue for stationary applications - if anything the amount of Vanadium used in the battery, which directly contributes to the cost, is the issue there. In practise there are internal resistances in the power stacks that limit the range of state of charge that you can practically use full power to (eg you might only get to use the full power in the range 20-80%, if you are prepared to knock back the power then you can charge 0-100% energy capacity. Some of the most interesting developments that I saw in Lyon were to do with improved flow profiling and electrolyte contact resistance which I expect will soon be contributing to getting greater effective use of the Vanadium electrolyte in an all VRFB flow battery, and it is developments like these that I believe Mikhail was referring to when describing how the kgV per GWh figure may come down from the current approximate value of 5000T/GWh in the next few years.

Why daitom ? - There's plenty of ore that could be supplied to Vanchem from Vametco/Brits

MIKINAMAN - as long as you like - 4 hours is becoming typical for VRFBs

Well Vanadium Nitride of course does allow you to get the same strength improvements with only 60% or so of the contained vanadium so now is an ideal time to start to introduce more of a premium for the product.

Pat48 - I think you may find that LSE is displaying all companies as have the same revenue and profit for the last 5 years

Indeed jogj99 - I had a good chat with Pat during the battery tour in what was only 5 months ago.

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/eskom-battery-site-visit-410

you know who you are, for letting me buy more shares at less than 24p.

Bespooked - do not befooled by the discussion of the 'footprint' of their utility scale energy storage system. I do not believe that they even have kWh sized system made with this approach so talking about multi megawatt hour sized installations is pure hype.

somtam - if you compare this with the complexity of this idea with scaling energy storage in a vanadium flow battery (take V2O5, dissolve in Sulphuric acid, pour into tank) you will see just what a nonsense their thing is. Cripes it doesn't even scale into the second dimension well as wafers can be made only so big - at the recent intersolar exhibition I was interested to see a 4m long 300mm diameter boule of silicon that is used to make PV panels. Out of this they get about 4000 wafers of c. 0.7mm thick (i.e. 30% already lost). I was told that the boule costs around $1M - so around $250 per wafer from this estimate.

How does this compare with other published data ? - Well https://semiengineering.com/mixed-outlook-for-silicon-wafer-biz/ shows 2018 production of 12,700 Million square inches at a cost of 11 Billion dollars - So roughly 12e9 Square inches for 12e9 dollars - or a dollar per square inch. A 12 inch wafer is about 110 square inches so $110 dollars - so we're looking at 100-250 dollars per single wafer.

How many wafers might they require for, say a car, even if they could get 4 times the energy density. Well the battery pack on a tesla weighs 540Kg, so if you only had, say 125Kg of silicon wafers, how many would this be ? Well a standard 300mm wafer is 125g ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_(electronics) ) so this brings us precisely to the 1000 wafer mark. That's already $100,000 before you have even though about etching them or adding anything else to them.

These claims are about as credible as wishing for a unicorn.

jogj99 - I suspect that Bushveld Shareholders are not going to be getting results of the Eskom battery tests.

Eskom will be though, but they are not about to reveal just how well the BE VRFB stacks up against the previous Lithium-ion battery test, ahead of their 1440 MWh BESS project tender, as that could lead competitor bidders to suggest that the competition was not conducted fairly.

Firstly a politician becoming a battery entrepreneur with claims that they can provide not only four times the energy density, but also four times the lifetime, AND at half the cost of a well established Lithium-ion battery industry worth tens of Billions of dollars sounds incredible. Because it is.

Then you get to the technical stuff - so not content with having to base it on silicon wafer technology they conclude that you need to etch half of the stuff away to make a silicon wafer sponge. Does this start to sound expensive ? Well it should do because it is. How expensive is a computer memory ? - actually pretty cheap because the active elements have over decades of research been scaled to incredibly tiny dimension.

You do not get the same benefit with battery energy storage - there is bugger all benefit in making the batteries any smaller, in fact you simply make more work for yourself and you cannot store any more energy. This is a nonsense idea, which is the reason it has been in 'stealth' mode, and is also the reason it will stay there.

how soon before we may be able to complete on Vanchem.

Interestingly when you look at Graysmaker you discover that they work closely with the SA listed Hulisani Investment company (https://www.marketscreener.com/HULISANI-LTD-27879552/company/ ) who have investments from numerous SA major enterprises such as the pension funds of both Eskom and Transnet. Whilst they may not necessarily being buying BMN shares (though they might once we list on the JSX) they are just the sort of people who might wish to get involved in energy+storage joint venture projects.

No not yet Bella

Integrated PV+Storage projects across africa might be nice Bella