VRFB: a ‘radically different’ battery4 May 2022 14:46
https://www.current-news.co.uk/blogs/green-hydrogen-vanadium-and-gravity-a-look-at-longer-duration-technology-winners
Vanadium flow: a ‘radically different’ battery
Chemical storage is also commanding an increasing amount of attention, as the UK’s share of renewables continues to grow. Invinity’s vanadium flow battery (VFB) technology is one of the technologies that could potentially step up to help balance surging intermittent generation.
“To be included as one of the leading participants in a programme whose explicit purpose is to underline the important role longer duration energy storage technologies will play in our increasingly low-carbon energy system is a great honour,” said Matt Harper, CCO at Invinity.
“This is the second project we are working on with Pivot Power, part of EDF renewables, having delivered a 5 MWh VFB to their Energy Superhub Oxford project last year.”
Its Vanadium Flow Battery Longer Duration Energy Asset Demonstrator project will see a 40MWh installation developed, which will be used to show how VFBs can improve the operation and economics of grid-constrained solar generation sites.
VFBs are “radically different” from lithium-ion batteries, said Harper, as they were always designed to seve the electric grid, as opposed to emobility or telecommunications.
“By storing energy in a liquid electrolyte containing the element vanadium, VFBs are able to cycle continuously without degrading, giving them the ability to deliver high-throughput service to the electric grid over hours per day for decades of use,” he added.
“That makes VFBs ideally suited for filling in the “missing hours” where renewable generation – and in particular, wind and solar power – falls short. In addition to making solar and wind power available on demand, VFBs are also capable of fast response times to provide high-throughput grid services such as dynamic regulation.”
Additional benefits of the technology include being non-flammable, not suffering from thermal runaway, and operating best at higher temperatures, reducing the need for additional cooling.
There a number of benefits to running at a higher temperature like this, the company said, including mitigating the kind of cooling system failure seen at US-based energy storage facility Moss Landing, which kept it offline for a number of months following a sprinkler system releasing water onto battery racks.
“As the energy transition progresses, we are seeing market needs evolving,” finished Harper. “With intermittent wind and solar power providing a proportion of our total energy mix, technologies that can deliver multiple hours of energy to support the grid, every single day, 365 days a year clearly have tremendous and increasing value. This is beginning to generate tremendous market demand for solutions based on emerging technologies such as flow batteries.”
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