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kenny thanks for posting that - obviously Largo comes out top, but did you know that they have to sell everything they make to Glencore until the end of 2019 ?

Whilst many have bemoaned the removal of PV panel feed in tariffs - the idea that the grid will always be on hand to take your excess power, and is prepared to pay you more than you pay them for it (as it was before 2015) was always going to be a short term situation. Essentially it was a way of trying to encourage the people to pay for the cost of installing solar panels, so that the government did not appear to have to incur those debts.

The removal of feed-in-tariffs has in a number of other countries, eg Australia, encouraged the introduction of behind the meter domestic energy storage (if you are not getting paid to send the electricity back to the grid then you might as well store it so that you don't have to take so much energy from the grid later in the day.)

Domestic user understand this situation and can react as described above. The trouble is that few politicians understand system as complex as the grid and so few of them appreciate how much low carbon electricity may be being wasted because renewable energy farms are not coupled with energy storage. This is a situation that we will need to improve.

Indeed mick you would think that the share price of one of the world's only primary producers of Vanadium would have something to do with the spot price of Vanadium (there is no futures market unlike most other commodities) but as the video here shows the illiquid nature of the AIM market means that the price can easily be held by non-Vanadium price factors, such as a share sell overhang:-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/slides/slide/bushveld-minerals-in-a-minute-50

For 3 months at the start of 2018 the price was held in the band 8-9.5p due to the selling by Erongo which started in mid December 2017 ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/the-end-of-erongo-260 )

The same situation is now currently going on as those financiers that participated in the 26th March 2018 placing which raised USD 22.2M to (amongst other things) pay off short term loan notes and buy out the remaining minority interest in Vametco (Sojitz's 15%) are now cashing out on some (or all) of their shares with 300% profits. The last of the warrants went some 2 months ago,

Thus the the only question at the moment is essentially "how long is a piece of string" - at what point will the strong buying of the last 3 months have completely taken out all of the shares that are currently being offered by the tame sellers we currently have on board. Each day more is another day closer to yet more transformative news.

mick-b thanks for correcting this, I'm not a subscriber but I know that people here mentioned it weeks ago.

Troajan, the impending supply shortage in Vanadium was known 18 months ago. I write about it here:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vanitec-2nd-energy-storage-meeting-part-1-206

When there are only 3 mines outside of China and two are controlled by Glencore what do you think happens when supply is tight ?

Vanadium is not like other commodities because the majority of it is made as a by-product of making steel from dirty ores - if the price of steel is suppressed nobody makes steel out of dirty ore just to get a little bit of Vanadium. In fact what they do is shut the steel plants down, purely for economic reasons. Then add to this fact that the chinese have been shutting down the dirty and inefficient (but vanadium producing) steel plants due to the fact they don't like suffocating in the smog, but at the same time decide that they are going to introduce proper legislation to require Vanadium in their rebar, then you have the mother of all long-term systemic changes in the Vanadium Market.

In july this year I wrote ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/vanitec-4th-energy-storage-meeting-part-1-274 ) that the industry's leading expert on Vanadium, Terry Perles had predicted that by 2025 Vanadium consumption will hit 133,000 tpa V (some 50% higher than now) even without any increase due to VRFB energy storage projects.

The information has been publicly available on the bushveld perspective for a months even years.

However it is still not too late to invest in BMN precisely because the AIM market is such an inefficient one - there has been no official announcement yet of yearly profit figures, as the 2018 accounts are yet to be announced. All the time, however, we have been tracking every single containerload of vanadium nitride (nitrovan) that gets delivered to the US (about half of total sales) - 16 Million dollars delivered just last month ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/nitrovan-shipments-to-the-us-183 )

At the moment sites such as this one still don't even have the last 12 months of broker targets listed ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/analyst-watch-232 ). The only one of the UK sites that seems to even be half on the ball is stockopedia, which has an expected EPS for 2018 of something over 8p per share.

Please do your own research.

It is a pity you didn't do your research properly kenny as if you had you would have realised that it was worth buying at 8p. Had you bothered to do that then you would be 400% up at the moment.

ahh I see we have the old tag team in action again. Just as believable as giant haystacks and big daddy.

Thank you and good bye

ditto pdub - hope you're feeling better after last weeks trip to hospital. By the sound of it you had only just got back from the channel islands and were then suddenly taken ill.

IH - you seem to have fallen for the nonsense that 'shorters help make the market' - no they do not - the market makers do that, and they are currently doing that by shorting the share themselves. Once they have managed to drop in sufficient shares from their tame seller they will move the price back up again.

At least the market makers are regulated and don't come posting on PI's discussion boards to try and induce fear and uncertainty. The same cannot be said of amateur hour shorters and spreadbettors who regularly come on here to try and convince us that their particular reading of some arbitrary technical indicators shows that the share price is heading down, or may go up, or up then down or the opposite, backwards.

The standard excuse is that shorting 'adds liquidity' - by effectively allowing shares to be created to fill short term buying pressure. But robbing peter to pay paul in shares does not change the fundamentals of the company. But what it can do is rip off those shareholders who are not sufficiently informed enough to understand that these types of games are regularly being applied to what they may have assume is a 'fair' market, or those that are forced to sell by the circumstance of their own financial position or trading platforms.

So why don't you and 1onic take your particular brand of self-deluding and arrogant nonsense back to the TECA board where it belongs and stop trying to lecture us about living in 'echo chambers'. We have done mighty well in the last 2 years by following the company fundamentals and will continue doing so without you thank you very much.

I appreciate that you aren't used to such a robust response but maybe now you understand why the BMN board is the most highly rated on lse.co.uk and the posters here also dominate the recommendation rankings.

I have to say I thought that the chuckle brothers were a better double act. These guys are really hopelessly ill-researched.

Serenus and 993444 - I suspect that blast was to produce large amounts of rock for building work, eg the raised section near the primary tip bin shown at 2:17 in the video here:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngR6-IiemnU&feature=youtu.be

Psyurmh - knuttie has over 10M shares and keeps a million or so running on things like T20's so he sells and buys all the time.

Mikinaman - yes larger systems are of course containerised so they are precisely truck sized. But they aren't driven around with electrolyte in, and of course you don't want to even consider using VRFBs for electric vehicles as the specific energy density is not high enough and likely will never be high enough. Use Lithium Vanadium Phosphate for eVs

There is little fundamental reason that they cannot be made very small - laboratory testing devices might have only 10cm2 of membrane and 100mL of solution. The trouble is that it becomes economically less sensible to build the device as the amount of energy stored goes down. A standard Li-ion or Zinc carbon battery scales quite well to small sizes, because they were developed for power kids toys, transistor radios, and now hand tools. A VRFB size scales sublinearly with energy - add more energy and all you need to add is more solution. Equally halve the energy and you still have to have the same power cell size and cost (assuming constant Power delivery capability) and only the electrolyte tanks get smaller by 50%.

If you compare with solid state batteries when you halve the energy (eg by halving the number of batteries) both the energy and power delivery capacity halve so perhaps I am overstating the case against VRFB's.

Suffice it to say the smallest VRFB that I have seen is the domestic Voltstorage Smart at 6.8KWh. I cannot find an energy spec for StorEn's batteries - it will be interesting to see what happens in 4 days when their crowdfunding campaign is meant to come to a close - they are currently at around 60% of their target.

A useful perspective knuttie - if you look at the warrants selling during that period ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/warrants-outstanding-224 ) you can see that the price was not held back by warrants be disposed of.

Erongo, we believe, was first able to sell in mid december 2017 ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/the-end-of-erongo-260 ) and the holding position between then and mid march 2018 can clearly be put down to the Erongo overhang:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/slides/slide/bushveld-minerals-in-a-minute-50

The pre-march level may perhaps have been down to the fact that the Vametco deal was not completed at that point - the SP only really appreciated a few weeks before the completion of the Vametco deal in April 2017 - it's almost as if some people in the market knew ahead of time that this was coming.

Between April and Dec 2017 we had regular visits from shorting and trolling crews (April was when the serious trolling here really started) - the most famous episode being the 18th Aug 2017 Flash short :-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-trade-analysis-6/post/18th-aug-2017-flash-short-context-198

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-trade-analysis-6/post/18th-aug-2017-flash-short-analysis-199

I heard the same but thought it may have been the floods in texas, though they may have been the same overall weather event (nothing to do with climate change of course Mr President)

Richken - Tesla's business plan has always been to try and shunt old battery cells from cars into Home storage systems. The lifetime of the car batteries is exaggerated by the fact that they have extra cells onboard which they switch in over time to make it look like the battery cells are not degrading as fast as they really are. This is all fine as far as car transportation goes but it means that when Tesla powerwalls actually start taking real end of life batteries instead of the new ones they are being given right now, that their performance will start to drop off even faster than the are doing now.

It did not come as a great surprise to me to see that the advertised performance of Tesla powerwalls has been steadily being reduced, and prices have steadily been increasing. A company with deep silicon valley pockets can temporarily subsidise their early adopters to try and grab market share but only for so long, eventually they have to start living in the real world.

Tyfoon - one of the things that jumped out at me from the article preamble was:-

The latter can be build either by numbering up of small cell stacks or by scale up of the electrode area.

Normally cell stacks are something like 50xcm x 20cm in membrane area - 0.1m^2 at the International Flow Battery forum last year Gregor Polcyn of Thyssen Krupp showed a 2.5m^2 cross sectional power stack - some 25 times larger in cross sectional area. I have in my notes the statement that 1 stack = 1MW = 6m long.

They showed us a top secret video of them craning 50MW of power stacks into the Peter Fischer's VRFB building at the Fraunhofer Institute in Karlsruhe. They had to cut a hole in the roof to do this, as evidently it was an unexpected positive development. This just goes to show the kind of improvements in the technology that are happening right now.

I realise that I have not yet written up the IFBF conference for those here. This will come when I get the time.

good point knuttie and pdub