Flow Batteries Are Here and They Will Change Everything

Right, efficiency will not end up mattering much. For the first 4 hours, 80% is fine. Beyond that, 50% round-trip is fine. Other numbers matter more.

But we don't need any particular storage tech, or even all the eventual winners in aggregate, to pan out quickly. There is no need for storage that there is not enough renewable generating capacity to charge up.

After enough renewable capacity has been built out, the winners will be known, and storage prices will be much, much lower.

What we do need is a hell of a lot more money put into renewable generating capacity. It is being built out at an impressively high rate, but not high enough to forestall climate catastrophe.

After enough generation and storage is built out, we will need to start outlawing carbon exhaust and building out carbon capture. But those cannot happen yet. Carbon capture, in particular, is an overwhelmingly worse use of money than installing renewable generating capacity to displace carbon exhaust. And we can't force most current polluters to stop without a replacement already in hand for them to switch to.

But factories to make storage and capture equipment of all kinds need to be built now, because that takes a long time, and cannot be rushed, and we will need a very great deal of both. If that means some of the factories will be for eventual losers, so be it.

I'll grant that I'm not an expert in this kind of thing, but according to the article:

> Furthermore, vanadium is a readily accessible element in many different easy-to-find minerals. The rest of the battery is made up of equally accessible materials, making it easy to assemble and recycle, in comparison to lithium-ion batteries, which need metals like cobalt and manganese to function.

This paragraph links to the following website: https://www.australianvanadium.com.au/what-is-vanadium/

Obviously this doesn't answer all questions, but at the very least it's a place to start.

There are also organic ones, which seem kind of like stripped down biological respiration. Pretty cool. Redox stuff with hydrocarbons.

I think lithium batteries currently range $50-$100, $132 seems pretty high.

The problem with those LCOS numbers is, from what I've seen, that it's a projected cost once production is scaled to a certain (high) level. Lithium ships in high volume today and benefits from scale, flow batteries don't. Manufacturers with public info like ESS are careful to qualify the price disclosures like that by saying it assumes future scaling - it's not their cost today.

For example, from the ESS ($GWH) 10-K:

> [W]e have not yet produced any iron flow batteries, Energy Warehouses or Energy Centers at volume and our expected cost advantage for the production of these products at scale, compared to conventional lithium-ion cells, will require us to achieve rates of throughput, use of electricity and consumables, yield, and rate of automation demonstrated for mature battery, battery material, and ceramic manufacturing processes, that we have not yet achieved.

If there's info to the contrary, I'd love to see it, but I'm skeptical of any current cost advantage. At the moment they seem to mostly be attractive for longer duration battery installations, like that Fort Carson 10-hour battery mentioned in the article.

They only make sense when you have large amounts of low carbon power that you want to store for long periods of time.

Usually, just turning down some fossil fuel plant is a better option.

Using the electricity via demand response comes after that.

A long wire to somewhere else that can use it and send you back some of their excess is next.

If you really can't use that power for anything lithium batteries are cost efficient as long as you regularly cycle them (e.g. daily solar peaks).

So you need to get into storing power for long periods of time before they have a niche. Which is on its way, but isn't here yet. So building more renewables makes more sense. (Do enough of that and eventually you'll want some more storage options).

The article has a link in it to: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/flow-batter...

If you scroll down there's a table 32.7 about Projects in China. A number of which, according to that table, are completed.

Vanadium redox flow batteries aren't that new - the first successful ones were made in the 80s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

I hope they get the economics to work.

Also the longest duration flow battery in the Wikipedia article runs 10 hours. We really need something that can charge for months in the summer and discarge for months in the winter. Maybe rust https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27944600 or aluminium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26463249 ?

Any chemistry still being considered can operate at your "grid scale". If you need more storage, you buy more battery. Pumped hydro dominates mainly because the dams and turbines were already there.

So "can it operate at grid scale?" is a bullshit question. All storage alternatives can operate at grid scale by adding more units. What matters is cost, and costs are changing.

Even Energy Vault's fraudulent hi-rise condo for concrete blocks could scale up, in principle. It would just be stupidly expensive, and its cost cannot come down noticeably, so they won't sell any condos. People holding NRGV shares will lose badly, and people with call options on it, much worse. You might make a lot of money betting it will collapse, but they could in the meantime swap equity for something that works, and then not ruin that. Unlikely, though: who would be smart enough to have something that works, but dumb enough to swap?

Some technologies and battery chemistries will win big, reliably. We just don't know which ones.