Member Info for Alfacomp

Yachty - the CTO wasn't actually at the event - the marketing manager was who I spoke to. I have emailed their CTO this morning.

Yachty, I believe that these are Lithium-ion batteries, simply because that's all they seemed to know about when I spoke to them at the Fully charged event.

From the pictures that they had available at that event they appeared to be contemplating around 10MWh Battery storage for a n eV charging 'forecourt' with 24x 350kW chargers - thus potentially enough energy to deal with all chargers going flat out for just over an hour. They also had solar panels spread all over their forecourt but this is apparently only sufficient to power the building itself thus the batteries are actually the thing that powers the car chargers and is supplied by/provides energy storage services to the grid.

numpty5 - I have the contact details for the chief technical officer of gridserve if you want to suggest VRFBs to them. I spoke to their marketing manager at the Fully charged event and they plan to put significant stationary batteries on each of their sites. I pointed out the safety issues but he glazed over because he didn't know what I was talking about and he didn't want to hear it.

https://www.gridserve.com/post/breaking-news-1

Leafie - that's 10 years old that video - in case you weren't aware

dumaskullanga - at the fully charged show I asked the people on the phoenix contacts stand about swappable batteries - they make the electrical connectors for lots of the chargers and would no doubt have been in favour of the idea. They told me that they thought the idea was a non-starter for joe public due to safety concerns.

They also showed me the built in liquid cooling system that they need to have inside the cable of their 500kW charging station (1000 Volts, 500 Amps) - imagine just one milliohm contact resistance in the connector for that - that will drop 0.5Volts and there will be 250W generated right at that point (something like 1/5th of an electric kettle) - that's an awful lot of very localised heating.

There is a similar liquid cooling system that needs to continue to run inside the lithium-ion batteries and the cables feeding them inside the vehicle whilst you are rapid charging them. When the cars are running there is actually a degree of air cooling that you can call upon, but not whilst it is sitting still, and importantly for our angle also not in a stationary battery application.

Mikinaman - I too am a far of classic cars, but having had them I know how the reality differs from the fantasy, especially when it comes to spare parts and reliability.

Obviously there are going to be some classic car purists will throw a wobbly as soon as you use a screw made after 1960 and self-classify their addiction as a form of industrial archaeology I am more of pragmatist and like to see the vehicles actually being used, or even racing. No doubt the current electric conversions are expensive but as gambit will point out so are conventional ICE restorations, and anything to do with classic cars. I expect that electric conversions will get cheaper in time, whilst conventional restorations will get more expensive as those who know what they are doing die out.

knuttie - I don't think you can buy an electric vehicle with 40 miles battery capacity. Typically 150-200miles at present for 4-door vehicles like the Nissan Leaf with 200-250 miles for some of the larger vehicles like the Tesla X and Jaguar I-pace.

The reason I pointed out the ferrari electric conversion at the fully charged show is that the electric conversion made the vehicle go faster and made it a lot cheaper to keep on the road. (zero to 100kmin under 3 seconds - https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/motors/test-drive-classic-ferrari-goes-electric-as-wicklow-aims-to-be-ireland-s-motown-1.3857007 )

There's some more of their classic conversions here:- https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk/past-projects

Mikinaman - if you use your car to drive to work then there is a good chance that in future you would be able to charge there. If not then perhaps when you go to the supermarket. Remember nobody ever expects to be able to fill their petrol/diesel tank at home.

Rapid charging of 40-50 kW (typically 80% charge in 30-60 mins depending on the battery capacity) is becoming increasing available whilst ultra rapid charging (Tesla Supercharger 150kW, Porsche 350kW) are also being introduced which obviously makes things go even quicker.

https://www.zap-map.com/charge-points/

up to 29p, but no trade - clearly a hidden buy behind the scenes there

Well put Ophidian

As this article describes - https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/shorting-on-bmn-and-largo-2018-19-423 the shorts on Largo are a total of more than 15M - so could easily accommodate the 2.33M short that would be needed on a Vaneck REMX Largo holding of 6.85M to match the BMN ratio of 7.9M short in 23.2M holding. This would equate to approximately 34% of the Vaneck REMX ETF.

spbhoy - the whole point about explaining the TPEP short is that it appears that this is essentially a dumb short to offset the BMN shares that they got when they bought Vaneck REMX ETF shares and not a brilliant piece of opportunism on the Vanadium price. I suspect that they may have not seen the Dec 2018 drop coming either.

Yep they are both £40.6K give or take a tenner or two. No surprise - I would suggest a shorter buying back

Bella - can you let us know which of the 950 pages of the pdf you posted is relevant ?

Bella - because those shares are all in illiquid and often hard to access companies. Vaneck reduces its holding primarily when people sell shares in the Vaneck ETF - that's how ETF's work.

TPEP increases their short holding on the days when Vaneck increased their shareholdings so it seems a simple leap to assume that the $20 Billion Hedge fund TPEP are buying Vaneck shares.

HaleSpur - yes you would think that Vanadium Nitride such as Nitrovan could be sold for a premium couldn't you.

However as explained here ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vametco-processing-plant-visit-408 ) Evraz did not take advantage of this, deciding instead to sell Nitrovan at exactly the same price as Ferrovanadium. Hence BMN cannot simply impose a significant premium at the drop of the flag.

Long term safety is a key issue for domestic installations - especially in the US where every other building is made of wood and every third building contains a lawyer.

"Bushveld Minerals has an aggressive vanadium production expansion plan,"

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/editorials/2019-06-13-editorial-only-a-deep-rethink-can-save-mining/

Hamil - there are all sorts of way that fossil fuels are subsidised. The main one is that they do not pay the appropriate costs for the CO2 that they generate.

When comparing renewable energy sources + batteries you have to compare with burning fossil fuels and then capturing the CO2 from the air and burying it permanently.

However Solar plus storage is already beating combined gas cycle plants in many places ( https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/solar-storage-beats-combined-cycle-gas-in-jordan-and-morocco ) EVEN if you don't add in the cost for Carbon Capture and Storage. ... so why even bother thinking about going down the second route ?

at least the person who runs the first site is prepared to brazenly admit it:- "I’ve always been a skeptic of the hypothesis mankind is causing catastrophic global warming because it is pumping a few ppm of a trace gas into the atmosphere."

https://notrickszone.com/about-pierre-gosselin/

If you want to know the facts the 'few ppm of a trace gas' is approximately 2ppm per year, that is on the base level of 300ppm in around 1950. So we are increasing out CO2 concentration by roughly 0.7% per year. Since I have been alive CO2 levels have risen by over 110ppm (35%).

https://skepticalscience.com/co2-measurements-uncertainty.htm

The trouble is it is worse than that when you start looking at global warming. Even if you stopped all CO2 production tomorrow that increased level of CO2 will still be in the atmosphere for many decades so the global warming effect carries on for at least as long as that.

Even worserer still is the possibility that once certain levels of warming are achieve and large amounts of planetary ice are melted they will generate even more CO2 that will further accelerate the process of warming. This is when it is too late and we will have officially effed up the planet.