Mojapelo interview comments on the energy business:11 Jul 2023 16:39
MW: We’ve been getting calls from people who are in renewable energy and they're saying the delivery time for lithium batteries is horrific. Renewable energy developers needing a lot of storage say they can't get lithium batteries and have remarked to us that, marvellously, they are going to be able to source long-endurance vanadium batteries locally from Bushveld. When will that likely come about?
Mojapelo: The whole premise of Bushveld Energy and VRFBs is that, going forward, the energy transition means that we're going to not only need a lot of stationary storage but also long-duration energy storage, and that is a space which is ideal for vanadium flow batteries, due to their longevity over 20 years. With their six, eight hours plus, they become that much more prolific and competitive. It's encouraging to see that, increasingly, people are waking up to the proposition of VRFBs. If you look at the whole electric vehicles mandate the world over, it’s quite clear that there's not enough capacity to support lithium-ion battery requirements in the electric vehicle space, let alone stationary storage space, which, again, is much more suited to long duration solutions like VRFBs. That's what we've been building Bushveld Energy towards. We've got the electrolyte plant in East London, which we are commissioning - 200 MWh worth of electrolyte is the capacity. It can be scaled up to 800 MWh. We've got the minigrid at Vametco, which showcases how you can deploy renewable energy with VRFBs in a commercial environment. Importantly, this is not a subsidised project and it has been funded with debt, with third-party capital, and demonstrates that we can do these things at much, much bigger scale. Then, of course, there’s our share in the VRFB manufacturing companies - CellCube, completes the picture, together with the rentals which we have developed and which we are deploying. If the question is can we respond, and let's look beyond just Bushveld Energy, I think VRFBs today can respond to that requirement, and we're certainly looking forward to seeing VRFBs playing a bigger role in the renewables storage space going forward.
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