RE: SP16 Dec 2019 20:09
Hi Daisydog I understand your frustrations but the explanation is in Pdub's transcript from the man himself regarding VRFB.
Remember this was before we even looked to become part of 3 VRFB manufacturers.
Fortune: So I'll make a couple of comments and Mikhail will talk further around it. And it's the following. When we started up BE our thinking was informed by 2 motivations. The first one was we noted that 90% + of V demand was coming from the steel sector and any opportunity to diversify and strengthen the demand profile for V would be something that would be of interest to us. And then the second motivation was when you look at the energy storage market it is a large market, potentially a $100 billion market by the end of the next decade. So it's a market which commercially is compelling. And on both accounts we decided to create BE to drive VRFBs in the stationary energy storage market.
Now what also supports that on top of the economic proposition of this market was the observation that the main hurdle to adoption of VRFB technologies in the stationary market are hurdles that are eminently solvable and that we as a company have a lot of opportunity to have direct impact on it. And one of those hurdles is the availability and security of supply of V, given that VRFBs utilise the amount V of that they do. And just to put that in perspective a 100,000 MWH market by 2027 as forecast by Navigant (TBP has made public estimates that are very similar), if you take out 10% of that as the market share that VRFBs can take up and some estimates put that as 18% to 25% you would need something like 55,000 mtV just to meet that.
That's more than 50% of last year's total global vanadium production. And the second hurdle that you needed to address is the one of vanadium contribution to the total cost of the VRFB, which we are solving for through the rental product but also making sure that we've got a low cost production base which is scaleable and this is why as a company we have spelt out an intention to more than quadruple production over the next 3 to 5 years. So if you can solve for those two key hurdles then VRFBs have a unique opportunity to emerge as one of the leading technologies in the global stationary energy storage market.