VRFB News28 Jun 2021 21:19
Vanadium flow batteries' (VFBs’) primary advantage lies in the ability to deliver vast amounts of energy at low cost over a working life measured in decades, not years. As a form of non-degrading energy storage, it has an extremely low marginal cost of use and is well suited to doing the sort of cycle intensive, deep-discharge flexibility that future energy systems will need.
The past 10 years have shown that initial system-wide carbon reductions are both possible and affordable and have been well supported by short duration storage to date. The challenge now is towards a zero-carbon system, which represents a huge opportunity for VFBs.
Consider solar PV, which has a low levelised cost of energy (LCOE) and is easy to develop at a range of scales. As the proportion of on-site demand or grid connection met by PV increases, it reaches an economic level of curtailment where deploying one more panel does not bring the revenues required to pay for itself. This supports on-site decarbonisation of around 40-50% for behind-the-meter solar.
Beyond that level, local curtailment issues mean that solar PV deployment is beginning to get stuck. For solar to provide more dispatchable low carbon generation, energy storage must be deployed. Storage becomes constrained not by the duration required for discharge, but by the duration of the charging opportunity. With the first and final hours of the day’s solar PV generation taken up by demand, this leaves 4-6 hours to charge during the midday generation peak (with seasonal and geographic variation). This would be considered long-duration storage in today’s market and, given solar PV’s reliance on the diurnal cycle, would require near-constant cycling of any energy storage asset.
Enter vanadium flow batteries.
https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/vanadium-flow-batteries-for-a-zero-emissions-energy-system
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