Vanadium is expensive, though the price fluctuates wildly – currently $11K to $15K / tonne of Vanadium Pentoxide. But advocates claim Vanadium flow batteries have the potential to solve the intermittency of renewable energy.
StorEn Tech Provides First Of Its Kind Vanadium Flow Battery To Australia
December 19th, 2020
Australia has taken another step toward greater use of battery energy storage thanks to a new 30 kWh StorEn vanadium flow battery that was installed for use in a renewable hydrogen plant at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
The battery, which was provided through a partnership between StorEn Technologies Inc.* and Multicom Resources Limited, will allow researchers in Australia to develop safety standards for the future use of vanadium flow batteries as well as helping to bring the technology to Australia.
The many features of vanadium flow batteries could make them ideal for grid-scale energy storage, which is something that Australia is looking to expand in the coming years.
…
Peter Talbot, a professor at QUT, said about the new battery — “vanadium flow battery technology promises safe, affordable and long-lasting energy storage for both households and industry.”
…
Vanadium has an energy density of 15-25Wh / L, so to provide backup for a 1GW renewable plant for a day, you would need:
24 x 1GW = 24GWh of storage, or 24,000,000,000 Wh / 25 Wh / L = 960 million litres of Vanadium electrolyte – say a couple of billion dollars worth.
An expensive battery, but not an unimaginable expense.
Of course a single day of backup capacity is not nearly enough. Wind droughts can last weeks or even months. So if your goal is to match the reliability of fossil fuel generators, you are going to need a lot more than a couple of billion dollars worth of electrolyte.
You might find that the electrolyte gets a lot more expensive over the course of negotiating your battery purchase agreement. The global Vanadium market is small, around 80,000 tons per year. So an attempt to purchase several hundred thousand tons of Vanadium to build a 1GW battery would have a substantial impact on global prices.
Assuming you somehow obtain enough Vanadium for your battery, your Vanadium Flow battery electrolyte cannot be allowed to overheat or freeze. So your new battery complex will need substantial air-conditioning, which will eat into its storage efficiency.
Vanadium has other important industrial uses. Vanadium is used as a steel additive to produce high strength structural steel, and is also an important component of military grade steel alloys, and critical steel components subject to high stress, such as automobile crank shafts. China is a substantial buyer in the global Vanadium market.
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Vanadium is why the Model Ts didn’t all rust away and why there are still millions out there,
A long-winded phrase simply meaning a boondoggle.
I have experience with vanadium and its a great poison.
So how do you maintain the system with a couple billion dollars worth of vanadium?
Logically build a nuke and avoid the problem.
But hey, it beats rhodium prices for enviro purposes.
Emissions Clampdown Sends Rhodium Prices on Explosive RallyNovember 30, 2020
The reason that Capitalism always out performs socialism is that people suddenly get very shrewd when it is their own money.
indeed. the tragedy of the commons is real.
Vanadium is bad news environmentally.
Had to dispose of a vanadium catalyst.
What a headache.
Vanadium is toxic.
Vanadium particles in vehicle brake dust are reported to be an environmental health problem comparable with all other vehicle emissions. And it won’t be changed by electrification of cars.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51049326
this technology was invented at University of New South Wales 20 years ago
It will always be 20 years away and may be better than Lithium Batteries as in principle the Vanadium has an infinite life
Many companies are again chasing the unicorn
I wonder how they have improved the lifespan over the one that was installed at King Island back in 2003. That failed after only a few years and was replaced by a large bank of lead acid cells (repair of the Vanadium Redox Flow battery was deemed too expensive)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_Hill_Wind_Farm
Information about this battery is difficult to find – it’s as if no one wants to be associated with the expensive failure of the ballyhooed technology
A 1GW renewable source requires an additional GW source to refill the battery when it is exhausted. That cost needs o be included.
Reality check about batteries.
According to weather data, the US has multi-day, wind/solar lulls covering at least 25% of the land area, which occur at random times throughout the year.
A lull is defined at 15% of normal for that time of year.
The US generators feed about 4000 TWh/y into the US grid, which would become at least 6000 TWh/y, after widespread use of EVs and heat pumps.
About 1500 TWh/y would be used by 25% of the land area, if the US were to have 100% of its electricity from wind and solar.
The shortfall would be about 85% of 1500 TWh/y = 1275 TWh/y, or about 1275/365 = 3.5 TWh/d
The capacity of any storage systems would need to be much larger than the discharge, because when a multi-day lull occurs, the system likely would not be fully charged.
If we assume it would be 50% charged, the minimum capacity would have to be 7 TWh to have a discharge of 3.5 TWh, for a one-day event, plus have enough reserve, just in case another such event would occur.
In case of batteries, any electricity flowing through them would have an A-to-Z loss of about 20%, which means, the discharge would be about 3.5/0.9 = 4 TWh, for a one-day event, and the capacity would need to be 8 TWh, just in case of another such event.
The turnkey cost of such systems, for a one-day event, would be about $500/kWh x 8 billion kWh = $4 TRILLION, WHICH, IN CASE OF BATTERIES, WOULD LAST ABOUT 15 YEARS.
Ugh, I can see it now. Someone will propose having enough of these batteries to take care of x% of the outages without having to use fossil fuels, then have a stand-by fossil-fuel plant that kicks in for the y% of the outages that exceed the batteries’ capabilities.
All of this leading to the most expensive power ever produced.
A much more promising large-scale energy storage technique is the Liquid Metal Battery system invented by Donald Sadoway at Ambri. Made of inexpensive, readily available elements from the low-Z end of the periodic table, it is inherently scalable, modular, and maintenance-free.
Calcium and Antimony are essentially inexhaustible and already produced by the megaton and kiloton, respectively (not including reduction to metal). Antimony seems to be the long pole in the tent, with global 2019 production of 160,000 tons.
“Each GWh of Ambri batteries requires less than 1% of current annual production of these anode and cathode materials.”
Refs:
https://ambri.com/technology/
https://ambri.com/benefits/
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-antimony.pdf
I have expanded on my earlier comment regarding the cost of utility-scale battery systems to cover a widespread, ONE-DAY wind/solar lull.
.
Here is a more realistic version.
Reality Check Regarding Utility-Scale Battery Systems.
According to weather data, the US has multi-day, wind/solar lulls covering at least 25% of the land area, which occur at random times throughout the year.
A lull is defined at 15% of normal for that time of year.
The US generators feed about 4000 TWh/y into the US grid, which would become at least 6000 TWh/y, after widespread use of EVs and heat pumps.
About 1500 TWh/y would be used by 25% of the land area
Assume, for calculation purposes, the US has 100% of its electricity from wind and solar.
The shortfall would be about (100 – 15) x 1500 TWh/y = 1275 TWh/y, or about 1275/365 = 3.49 TWh/d
The capacity of any storage systems would need to be much larger than the discharge, because when a multi-day lull occurs, the system likely would not be fully charged.
Assume battery maximum charge is 16 TWh, DC
Assume battery partially charge at start of lull is 50%
Battery available charge is 8 TWh, DC
Charge required for one-day lull is 4 TWh/d, DC
Charge remaining for another one-day event is 4 TWh, DC
Discharge loss, A-to-Z basis is 10%
Electricity for one-day event, delivered as AC to HV grid is 3.60 TWh, which is ample and allows for degradation.
Battery turnkey unit cost is $500/kWh, AC
Battery charge available, as AC is 16 TWh DC x 0.9, discharge loss = 14.4 TWh, AC
CAPEX, turnkey, would be about $500/kWh, Ac x 14.4 TWh, AC = $7.2 TRILLION
Battery life is about 15 years