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One of the interesting things in that article is the graph that shows Lithium-ion battery costs per KWh plummeting to sub $200 per kWh. This is just one of the highly deceptive metrics used by the Li-ion battery industry - Lithium-ion batteries cannot be cycled to 0% State of Charge (SOC) without permanent irreversible damage to the battery (ok each charge-discharge results in irreversible capacity loss but a discharge to zero is very very damaging) - so Lithum-ion batteries are typically only actually cycled between 20% and 80% SOC.

So take the headline CAPEX/kWh figure and multiply by 167% to get the real cost per kWh of energy you can actually store in Lithium-ion cells.

According to https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/EF/Areas/Energy-storage/Battery-recycling :-

* only 2 per cent of Australia's annual 3,300 tonnes of lithium-ion battery waste is recycled
* this waste is growing by 20 per cent per year and could exceed 100,000 tonnes by 2036

Endion and Loudspeaker - from that same Energy Storage article:-

"when requested for comment back in May, the US office of battery maker LG Chem refused to handle the matter, deferring back to corporate HQ in Korea but claiming to be unable to contact or obtain comment from there. Direct requests to that HQ have yet to be acknowledged. Both Samsung SDI and LG Chem, among the country’s biggest players have taken a big financial hit based on one-off costs of dealing with the safety issue."

So two Major South Korean companies, being protected by the South Korean energy ministry - doesn't sound at all dodgy then.

Endion - see for example this article:-

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/koreas-ess-fires-batteries-not-to-blame-but-industry-takes-hit-anyway

"After fires were started at a reported 23 battery energy storage installations in South Korea during 2018, the government and a national standards committee have discovered the causes but have so far declined to engage with the international press on the matter."

"South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, and the national Standards Committee were reported by local news outlets to have held a press briefing a week ago, revealing that in nearly every case the issue appears to have been poor management of batteries, rather than anything inherently unsafe in the batteries themselves."

Yeah right.

Endion, the south Korean's have had 21 Lithium ion battery fires in the last few years. This has affected approximately 4% of their energy storage capacity. The largest was apparently 20MWh - I asked why more about these fires was not known about in the west and I was told that the government hushed it all up to protect certain unnamed lithium-ion based organisations.

Bella - it has been clear for some time that BMN and BE are at the centre of the VRFB industry. The real question is whether I am more confident about the VRFB industry or not. As I was just writing to my accountant (who is now a BMN shareholder) on the same topic I copy what I wrote to him here:-

"It is clear that only the Vanadium flow battery chemistry has sufficient critical mass to create any useful kind of industry that can take on lithium-ion in the next 10 years. Sure there’s one manufacturer of Zinc-Bromine flow batteries here and one manufacturer of Zinc-Iron flow batteries there but one company does not make an industry that anyone with any sense is going to be investing in or buying from. Vanadium has around 20 manufacturers now, plus others making membranes, bipolar plates, electrolytes and activated carbon felts as supporting suppliers. Battery users can usefully buy VRFBs knowing that even if one manufacturer goes by the wayside the industry will still be around to service them."

The time for major stationary energy storage is now upon us and only the Vanadium Flow Battery industry has any real chance of offering any kind of competition to stationary lithium-ion battery storage.

Bella I don’t think there is any suggestion that BE will work with only one VRFB company. In fact everything that I have seen supports the suggestion that they are working with all of them apart from perhaps VRB energy / pu neng who I believe have their own arrangement with Chinese vanadium miner pangang (if I remember the name correctly)

It's an absolute nonsense - they've completely messed up their projects and now they try jumping on the integrated mines-to-batteries bandwagon, what a bunch of jokers.

exactly right Pdub, they don't even have to say thanks or send a christmas card.

at last - it is possible to buy more than 1000 shares. At a price of just 0.025p below yesterdays closing price.

Obviously not a live price but the price for sells has risen 22.65, 23.1, 23.25p...

NT to buy even 1000 at present - an obvious tree shake

Just getting more cash lined up to take advantage of any silly drops.

Indeed JMC - I suspect that we will see other things like the Bushveld/Avalon Battery announcement coming out in the fullness of time. One thing that struck me about Avalon is the fact that over half of their modules are installed in China - though you might not know this because their batteries are sold under the NextTracker NX-flow name:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7biQafBOe8

Combining Flow batteries directly with a string of PV panels like this is quite clever as it allows them to be directly DC coupled - i.e. the DC that comes out of the PV gets fed straight to the battery so there are no inverter losses incurred.

Uksteveg - there was no specific timespan that I recall.

If you have questions you can ask me - it's easier doing that than writing the whole thing up longhand.

presentations are here:- http://www.vanitec.org/vanadium/ESC-Meetings

1.29M Buys, 1.32M Sells by 3:15PM. An excess of over 500K sells at 9:42am was completely reversed by 12 noon. Market Makers evidently took from either a shorter or tame seller and simply flipped the shares they bought at 23.58 (Avg) for 23.76p (Avg)

25K shares for me this morning thanks.

Brad29 - as I said people will have to be patient as it takes time to do it all justice.