Member Info for Alfacomp

it's a good job that this isn't one of them, eh homer ?

the money will end up here

Mike - that will be the same government that believed the safety claims of the people who clad the Grenfell tower is it ?

Fekir - don't beat yourself up for not being able to predict ALL of the future.

indeed Jamie - get the punters to pay over the odds whilst they are at the front door slavering to get in. Then take their tickets off them cheaply when the get inside to find the punchbowl saying 'the party is next door, see you there'

antelope - maybe they will

http://www.energystoragejournal.com/schmid-finalizes-joint-venture-to-build-giant-vrfb-plant-in-saudi-arabia/

kontiki2 - I cannot profess to know the specific minds of the Cleve Hill developers but the general idea is that 1. here's a service we can provide to the grid in exchange for a payment of X , 2) here's a lithium-ion battery with upfront capital costs of Y, 3) We think that we can use the battery enough times before it degrades to get X to pay for Y

i.e. they are thinking very short term simply about getting apparent contract revenue through their books but their thinking also assumes 4) we hope that it doesn't catch fire in that time and 5) if it does then the fire brigade can pick up the pieces, plus 6) by the time the batteries have degraded we're hoping that we don't need to pay a lot to have the thing taken down. Space Karen (Elon) keeps telling us that they'll be able to recycle these things quite soon anyway, honest, like errr, he did with the Hyperloop.

Great to see that the VRFB message is sinking in now. In time people will realise that it is the Vanadium that makes Vanadium Flow batteries possible.

every day that passes more and more people are becoming aware that VRFB' offer significant benefits over Lithium-ion batteries for grid storage.

AIM will catch up at some point when all the traders realise that we're past the point where the end of any Golden Summit overhang becomes long overdue. Then it becomes a simple matter of who gets in first.

There's a really good thread here on the dangers of large scale lithium-ion batteries

https://twitter.com/StoriesFromJack/status/1330477438216908804

The message is really starting to get out there.

if you want to find out more about the future of Energy Storage there is more discussion about this article on the BMN board

https://twitter.com/BMNperspective/status/1330470300702699520

JMC - I think that article must have been through a translator a couple of times - the word 'energy' keeps getting shown as 'vitality' and the analysts 'Wood-Mackenzie' are coming out as 'Wooden Mackenzie' , which I am sure their marketing agency will be delighted about.

reteps and mcgrco - an excellent find. I had been in touch with the guys from the FT for the last few months and are pleased that they gave such a balanced view of the energy storage landscape:-

I cannot really find much to fault with the following:-

"One of the winners of the tender was Invinity Energy Systems, a company that uses large batteries based on vanadium, a raw material used by the steel industry to increase the strength of metal. These so-called Redox flow batteries – first developed by NASA in the 1970s – use large reservoirs of separately charged electrolytes to store energy, making it easier to increase capacity than conventional batteries. .

Matt Harper, chief operating officer of the company, says vanadium batteries can store eight to 10 hours of renewable energy during the day and deploy it during peak demand, or overnight, helping to reduce the price of electricity. They are also “more likely to put out a fire than to start one,” he says, because they use a water-based electrolyte. They also last longer than lithium-ion cells – and can last 30 years.

In the center of Dalian, in northeast China, Rongke Power is building the world’s largest vanadium battery. At 800 megawatt hours, that would be more than three times the size of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery facility in California. This would help Liaoning Province’s power grid to better integrate wind power.

“We wouldn’t be allowed to install a large-scale lithium-ion battery in the city center, [due to safety concerns]”Says Li Bin, Marketing Director of Rongke. “The safety concerns of lithium-ion batteries have not been resolved.”

Still, vanadium prices are highly volatile and jumped to $ 127 per kilogram in November 2018 before dropping to $ 25 per kg today, which could impact the cost of production."

1. It doesn't say that Vanadium is 'exotic', 'unusual', 'rare' or a 'rare Earth' element - this is a step forward in high street coverage

2. Actually Redox flow batteries were used almost 100 years before NASA even heard of them, they were used to power the worlds first Airship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_France_(airship) )

3. Good to see Matt Harper being given the chance to promote VRFBs

4. Even better to see Dalian not just mentioned but described in a little detail, and not as a 'planned' or 'prospective' project.

5. Even better still to see Rongke power now stepping up to promote what they have done and explicitly stating that they would not have been allowed to put Lithium-ion in the centre of a city, for that is exactly where the Dalian 800MWh batteries lies.

#VRFB #CitySafeBattery #BMN

I'm just saying that if we are going to be taken seriously in the battery space, as we now should be, then we need to demonstrate some technical credibility, not simply spout some stuff we saw in the papers and which can be shot down in a heartbeat.

faramog - I think you'll find that it is the 'do-gooders' who have pointed out the issues with cobalt for years. It's a well known thorn in the side of Lithium-ion batteries and they are addressing it to some extent with non-cobalt chemistries now.

If you are wanting to show off to the relations at christmas then sure you can play the isn't cobalt terrible card, but if you were to try it in a real battery meeting you'd be laughed out of the place. There is little point in going on about cobalt much any more, that was news 2 years ago.

the 'share news' icon just flashed up with an article - I had assumed that facility had been disconnected.

interesting observations that the "Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa (FMCSA), the subsidiary of the American car manufacturer Ford, has the same ambitions with the aim of equipping its assembly plant at Silverton in Pretoria with a solar carport capable of producing 13.5 MWp. The long-term objective is to disconnect the factory from the South African national electricity network."

It seems slightly strange that in such a short article the reporter would just throw this connection in - or were they told about it by Abengoa ?

Thanks mogwhy - I had expected a number closer to 100K - which, as they have confirmed was the previous highest amount of production - but it seems that quite a lot of V was opportunistically produced from stone coal when Vanadium prices were high and it made that route (temporarily) profitable :-

(from the Bushveld article)

"In 2019, global vanadium feedstock production totalled 111,225 mtV, exceeding the previous peak of 101,791 mtV recorded in 2014, before Evraz Highveld ceased operations. Most of the volume, on a unit basis, came from Chinese **** producers whose production of **** increased as a consequence of greater steel production. This absolute steel production increase has seen Chinese co-producers operate at near capacity, limiting the scope for further production growth.

The fastest growth in supply, however, has come from primary production, which has grown by over 50 % in just 2 years. It increased from just under 13,000 mtV and 14 % of the market in 2017 to nearly 20,000 mtV and 18 %of the market in 2019. The growth has been led by price-elastic primary producers in South Africa and Brazil increasing their output in response to improved vanadium prices and, to a lesser extent, by opportunistic stone coal production, which accounted for about 9 % of China’s production."

mogwhy - can I ask where you got the figure of 111kT for Vanadium production from - that number seems a bit high to me and might include tonnes of V2O5 which are of course only 56% V by mass