Member Info for Alfacomp

been removed - I'm sure I had some sparkling witticisms earlier on

probably a big split between the pitcairners and tuvalese factions

OMG, just when you thought the situation could not get any worse ...

It was a parody account wasn't it ? Surely it must have been.

Actually I was being serious but I see on rereading that it might sound sardonic

Wolfman_Jack - I don't know about BMN acquiring RedT - but yesterday knuttie and I discussed acquiring it ourselves and decided to stay where we are thanks very much.

Sloppy Giuseppe - the stacking issue with Lithium ion batteries is not caused by their weight it is generally caused by the containers having to be a certain distance apart for fire regulations. I was speaking to someone who builds such container sized lithium ion batteries last week and they mentioned a distance of 3m between containers though I cannot recall the precise circumstances of this requirement.

VRFB containers can quite easily be stacked - at last years International Flow Battery Forum UniEnergy Technologies showed images of containers stacked 2 high.

In checking my notes from the conference I also chanced upon the remark that UniEnergy Technology would be working on 'regionalising' their production in the next 1-2 years. In the margin I put an arrow and marked 'BMN' against this - maybe we will find out about this quite soon.

Olly4 - you can cut and paste from the trade logs on LSE (5th icon along). There's some fiddling about to get the data into the right columns etc and then you can really go to work in allocating Buys and Sells properly as shown in the trade analysis pages on the Bushveld Perspective:-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-trade-analysis-6

Olly4 - you need to do a careful analysis of every single trade to classify into real Buys and Sells, also I make it 2.444M total volume so maybe you are missing some trades.

LinkedDreams - the sweet spot is not 500MWh if you want to actually talk to electricity companies. Given them between 1MWh and 100MWh and thy can find plenty of good things to do with that that will save them, or make them, money.

Fortunately VRFB technology scales acceptably down to 0.01MWh so there is no issue there. Sure having a couple of 500MWh VRFBs suddenly appear out of nowhere would be great for rubbing some headlines in the eyes of the Musk fans out there but to be honest if you want real examples of small to medium sized VRFB's performing the tasks that electricity operators can get their heads around right now you could not do better than Eskom's 1440MWh distributed Battery Storage project:-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/bushveld-energy-eskom-battery-mandate-2018-339

.... just as Lithium-ion battery development is not dependent on whether Tesla succeeds or not.

Because VRFB uptake is not determined by one single mega project that would take roughly 1.5 years of our entire production.

no it doesn't cindercone.

If you sit down and suddenly expect to be able to make the biggest battery in the world, and then do it a second time around and that coincides with another part of your government realising that it needs to start adding Vanadium to the country's steel then do not be surprised if suddenly the quoted price goes up and the supplier tells you sorry you're going to have to wait we're not currently able to supply at that scale because of component availability. You can ask Mr elon musk all about that concept.

May I remind everyone that it costs no more for us to dig the Vanadium out of the ground and process it than it did 2 years ago. Every pound of Vanadium we don't need for our VRFB plans is now selling at 5 times the price that it did back then - so what's not to love ?

If other VRFB manufacturers struggle to get cheap Vanadium because they do not own a mine then tough luck, but it will not affect us. As explained in my article at the weekend VRFB's already ARE cost competitive with Lithium-ion, furthermore they are naturally more scalable, long-lived, and safer than Lithium-ion batteries for Utility scale applications.

the 570+ views of part 1 of this report ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-414 ) who would like part 2 ?

Well done giglmilfbaggie - I just got another 12 grand's worth for my other half

Madasahat - speak to a Lithium-ion salesman and it will be "10,000 cycles or more"

Speak to someone who has actually measured it ( http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/91708/1/WRAP-techno-economic-analysis-viability-residential-photovoltaic-systems-Uddin-2017.pdf ) and you get:-

"The estimated battery degradation (Fig. 7) shows that the battery resistance almost doubled (100% PF) over five years while in the same time 20% of the initial battery capacity was lost."

They point out that "for the automotive industry the end of life of a lithium-ion battery is defined as
20% CF and a doubling of PF, for SHS applications there is no equivalent standard."

I would point out that many in the automotive sector are assuming that they will be able to flog their dead auto batteries to the stationary sector mugs after they are no longer any use in cars. Thus you won't be getting a nice new battery that lasts 5 years from the get go, but instead a battery that is already half knackered. Fine if you want to pay peanuts you'll get something that maybe only lasts 3 years before you need to replace it. I guess we've all had that experience once in our lives.

Brad29 - I don't think that anyone's LCOS includes recycling costs, as nobody seems to know what might be involved and whether it even makes any financial sense to promulgate a recycling cost or even industry existing.

It may of course make environmental sense and might even be environmentally absolutely necessary to avoid the possibility of huge piles of semi-dead Lithium-ion batteries catching fire. I don't think that there is currently any legislation requiring this and if large blocks such as the EU do introduce such legislation there are likely to be isolated third-world islands that are not yet underwater who will be happy to make a few quid by taking their toxic waste.

Thus I don't think LCOS includes a full cost of lifecycle, which perhaps gives Lithium-ion an unfair advantage over VRFBs. Until those buying batteries are also tasked with recycling them they will perhaps not care too much about those costs.

huzzy if you want to understand the energy market then the articles referred to in https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-414 are well worth reading. They are explained in relatively straightforward and non-technical ways.

Everyone invested here, even those professing no knowledge of technical things needs to understand the basics facts about the impending energy transition.

No Jamie