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A good summary Headancer but you forgot the bit about Vanadium also being more abundant than lots of Industrial metals, and even pre-industrial ones such as Copper. Forget about lithium thats another order of magnitude rarer.

Many are waking up to the fact that if the planet needs to build very many large grid batteries for energy storage then Vanadium is really the ideal candidate.

Let the MMs have a few shares to help their liquidity and then they'll be happy to see the price rise again later on.

I wonder what else might happen later today.

gkb - I see that you have sold your single share, does that mean we don't have to listen to you any more

vauch - 25 million paid in dividends is simply equivalent to 2.25p paid per share. Do you think that BMN buying potentially 100M shares, seeing off the shorters and reducing the overall shares in issue by 10% would not raise the SP to above 27.25p ?

gkb - you don't have 8,000 shares do you ?

vijay - these things don't take a few days, to be serious you have to be prepared to stick it out for months. Fortunately BMN has no debt and a cash pile and the resolution in place to buy over 100M shares.

perhaps ... https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-startup-thats-powering-rural-africa-with-affordable-smart-microgrids/

in the end their 35,150 went for 25.0p though that is not what they wanted

someone is trying to distort the end day auction price by selling at the unfeasibly low price of 24.0p

Lindon - see Sept 2015:-

Bushveld also announces today the launch of a share buy-back programme to repurchase up to 10 per cent of the Company's issued share capital by way of on-market purchases. The purchases will be at a maximum price (including expenses) of 105 percent of the average closing price for the Company's shares for the five trading days prior to the date of purchase.

The Board has examined the merits of share repurchases and has concluded that it would be in the interests of the Company and its Shareholders as a whole to provide for the flexibility to implement on-market share buy-backs. The Company has the necessary balance sheet to implement the share buy-back.

faramog - the point about renewables is that the cost is pure capex there is no fuel cost and minimal maintenance, and no CO2 of course. Electrolysis is surprisingly inefficient - something like 25% of the energy is immediately lost. Then you have the problem of storing and transporting the hydrogen gas, which even if it can be done safely leads to another 25% loss of energy. Even if you use a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back to electricity you suffer another 50% efficiency hit. So overall you put 100kWh of energy in and only maybe get 25 kWh back out - a really bad battery and not at all just a 'bit' more capital.

( https://www.greenoptimistic.com/hydrogen-cars-efficiency/ )

Many people have looked at this and the conclusion is genuinely that it is more cost effective to have a little wasted energy than try like crazy to store every single joule for use later. I know it seems wasteful. I know the green radicals would object. However it IS the most economical way to do things. Like making more food than we actually need, or having more hospital beds than we need when everyone is abroad on their holidays. Blame the tilt of the earth, but it is also what means there is life existing here.

No chance

I first saw the UET reflex modular system described at last year's International Flow Battery Forum - we'll see what their latest news is at the IFBF next week.

Interestingly this is not installed at the Engie site at Drogenbos which suffered a major Lithium-ion battery fire just over 18 months ago ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/slides/slide/lithium-ion-fire-at-drogenbos-11-11-2017-37 ) - the Reflex VRFB system is installed at the Laborelec lab which is about 2.5km down the road.

You can see what they are currently running at the Drogenbos battery pad by doing a google search for "map ENGIE Electrabel - Centrale Drogenbos" - I can see a couple of Lithium-ion battery systems from different manufacturers there on what was previously the car park. (Hint: don't park next to the batteries.)

Brad - i don't think you mean Roskill

dubmaskullanga - with the greatest of respect I think you are coming at this from the wrong angle. The job of the battery storage is not to deal with the seasonal variation. Well it could be if you chose to build a massive VRFB and only charge and discharge it once a year. Fine if your requirement is that the battery must last 10,000 years but unrealistic in the real world.

The battery quoted in the Eskom document is only 100kWh - so 1/10th of the size that your back of the envelope calculation suggests. This is because it is primarily only being used to deal with the daily diurnal cycle of energy usage when the sun comes up and goes back down.

Working on this basis you plan to cycle the battery at least once a day throughout the year. This allows you to build a battery of 1/10th of even less of the size. If you discover that your PV array is not sufficient to give you enough energy in the duller winter months, and you don't have the backup of a grid connection to help you out then the simple answer is to increase the size of the PV array so that it IS sufficient to supply enough average power even in winter.

This means you have more of an excess in the summer but that's acceptable because sunlight is free. Unless you have a way to feed that energy to something like a pumped hydro plant (not so easy in SA where water is scarce) then having to throw some of the summer energy away is simply what you have to accept as part of the lowest cost overall system design.

The following paper gives a very helpful summary of how to think about battery sizing on the national level. It shows how accepting a small amount of renewable energy excess (sometimes called 'curtailment') is a necessary step in having much more realisable battery provisions. Again you have to remember that wasting electrical energy from a renewable plant is not the same as wasting electrical energy from a fossil fuel plant - 1) you don't pay for any RE 'fuel' and 2) RE plants don't create any CO2 from the burning of that fuel

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292118301107?via=ihub

I see that a mining right application was made to the DMR in march 2015 but cannot find any record of it having ever been approved.

Do they have a mining right in place ?

Hamil - it is not the sort of thing that is worth streaming. Everything you should want to know is already in the Annual Report.

vijay - can I ask if you have come across the bushveld perspective yet ?

Hamil - I think it was just a bring-your-daughter-to-work day wasn't it ?
Surely the US is not looking to "make nepotism great again"