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I tried to read it but it doesn't make sense - 'cars charged with batteries made in the Midlands' - does he mean cars that contain charged batteries (obv made in the Midlands) or cars with batteries that have been charged from other batteries of an ill-defined sort except that they come from Brum ?

I'm sorry but it always becomes painfully clear very quickly when someone is trying to profess expertise on something that they don't really understand. We are obviously going to be told this is simply rhetorical flourish - a bit of colourful fluff to keep the Daily Telegraph readers happy but getting the technical stuff right is important, as otherwise you make the wrong decisions.

no bassguy and you can stop the obvious deramp now, it is all getting rather obvious now.

it's more than that Libero - the timing of the electrolyte plant tenders has been very sensibly delayed until the Eskom tenders are actually published.

Furthermore the timing on actually starting that build has been sensibly delayed until AFTER the Eskom tender results are known.

This is in my opinion no accident.

think about a conversation with SA policymakers might go:-

"You know there's those Eskom tenders to be judged ?"

"Yeah"

"You know that we're planning on building a large scale electrolyte plant that will create a number of construction and operational jobs in South Africa, not to mention the core of a complete new industry that makes use of locally mined minerals, found in no other concentration anywhere else on earth?"

"Yeah"

"Well ?"

"..... ahhhhh, I think I'm getting it now"

BE can make money from different parts of the supply chain, which is why it is not solely dependent on the South African electrolyte facility

https://www.offgridenergyindependence.com/articles/22279/newton-prize-2020-award-to-fund-solar-micro-grids-in-cape-town

They may wish to explore the possibility of adding on a South African made VRFB to some of these systems at a slightly later date. Possibly a small one from Invinity, Enerox or Voltstorage in Germany.

Bitterblue - it is how the market makers work - they want to sell 'hot' shares over the odds to idiot punters who then walk away with a 10% loss and equally do not wish to pay the going rate for quality investments that everyone can see are completely derisked.

It is no coincidence - this market works by tricking people into either buying or selling. It hates it when people know what they have got their hands on. Ultimately though they will run out of one sort of person to trick and then they will have to change tack.

Whilst there is still some doubt about whether GS have cleared their overhang or not they may continue in the same vein. At some point though they won't be able to keep up the pretence and the penny will drop as the SP rises.

He's a yank which is why he is obsessed with the idea of the Hydrogen economy.

However he had to point out that Platinum supplies ultimately constrains the cost-effectiveness of mobile Hydrogen driven vehicles.

Furthermore burning Hydrogen to produce heat that has been generated from electrolysis driven by renewables is about 500% more wasteful than using heat pumps in the same application - thus storing hydrogen in the domestic gas grid - where it is ultimately only ever going to get used for burning, makes little sense.

I think he was mistaken in thinking that Vanadium is used in Lithium-ion batteries. It isn't in any significant scale at present.

The one thing he was right about is that Vanadium is going to be needed in massive amounts for Energy Storage.

"The vanadium electrolyte will be processed from feedstock from Bushveld's primary assets in South Africa, by an industrial partner in the United Kingdom."

yes - has everyone forgotten about the VERL deal with Invinity ?

https://www.bestmag.co.uk/content/flow-batteries-harness-tidal-power-create-green-hydrogen

faramog - potentially though everything depends on the height of the storage vessels, and their precise diameter - oh and the exact process, oh and the rate of processing through the system, and the amount of stuff they actually put in the tanks. So hard to say categorically without having access to, what may still be, commercially private information. But the size of the building and diameter of the foundations for the tanks does suggest we're not looking at only 200MWh capacity for very long, if ever.

Lindon - of course that building is not Invinity's - it is their chinese subcontractor, and the building was not built specifically for any sort of VRFB or electrolyte production, unlike ours, which is.

people may complain 'but why did the company not publish this information and draw attention to it' - to which I would reply that they did not expect us to be poring over the engineering documents the day the tender was published.

Put simply - you do not build a building 16 metres high if you've only got tanks that are short enough for you to peek over the edge of. Thus there is a reasonable supposition that each sub-phase (eg 1A,1B and 2A,2B to come) could actually be for much more than 200MWh production per year, and potentially 4-5 times this figure, based upon the numbers quoted in the original Electrolyte plant scoping study.

mogwhy - that area is only as big as the area marked Phase 1A and 1B which are going up straight away. What we need to have is a clear statement of the size of these relevant phases. It is of course possible that each sub phase (i.e. 1A,1B) is 200MWh, or 250MWh, or even 500MWh.

The original environmental impact assessment (http://www.cesnet.co.za/pubdocs/Bushveld%20Energy%20Company/Draft%20Scoping%20Report_Bushveld%20Energy.pdf) describes each 200MWh (per annum) pre-production module as having 70 cubic metres of tanks for catholyte plus anolyte, plus 3x 20 cubic metre reacting tanks and 1x40 cubic metre intermediate storage tanks. This gives a total tank storage of 170 cubic metres for each 200MWh module.

The overall expectation is that 500 cubic metres of electrolyte is stored onsite - this would work out at 100 cubic metres of electrolyte in 170 cubic metres of tank volumes (per 200MWh module) which makes sense.

So let us look at the size of the tanks in the catholyte and anolyte area of the engineering drawings ( https://www.elidz.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ELIDZ-Bushveld-Tender-Drawings-Final-Rev-0.pdf ) - these show tanks 4.2m diameter of unknown height and a total of 4 Cath+An tanks in phase 1A (same for 1B etc)

So knowing that 200MWh seems to equate to Cath+An tanks of 70 m3 how high would these 4x4.2m di tanks have to be to have the same total capacity ?

Total area = 4x pi/4 (4.2m)^2 = 55.4 square metres. To get a total capacity of 70 cubic metres the tanks would have to be 1.25m high.

A tank 4.2m in diameter, but only 1.25m high (albeit on top of a support 0.5m high), in a building 16 metres high, does not seem right to me.

If you ask me the tanks are going to be at least 4 times as high as this.

however there are partners here in the UK that can.

have a look for yourselves here:- https://www.elidz.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ELIDZ-Bushveld-Tender-Drawings-Final-Rev-0.pdf

Structure of the plant - seems to have changed significantly from the original 200MWh modular approach originally outlined.

When originally pitched the modularised 200MWh blocks approach suggested that they could go for 200MWh and then increase with another 4 modules to get 1000MWh per annum later if they wanted.

The latest design drawings suggest that this modular approach is no longer defining the build and suggests instead that they are going all out for full production capacity in one single phase.

Dbush - which document states that ?