4 ms·

Sorry. This is the first time I am hearing about this tech. Why couldn't it be practical at the scale of a home? Say if you have a large backyard?

• candiodari 10y ago
  It can be practical at home scale: https://www.zcell.com/ https://www.zcell.com/
  • mdorazio 10y ago
    Only kind of. Zcell costs about 4x a Powerwall of the same capacity ($13k USD vs. $3500 USD) and has the same warranty duration (10 years), which to me means they're expecting it to last about the same amount of time in normal use. It's a decent alternative if you don't want Li-ion for some reason, but definitely not a good solution cost-wise in the home storage space. As others have pointed out, the benefit of flow batteries is that you can scale the tanks very large to add capacity without raising the cost too much, whereas Li-ion type batteries scale cost with capacity fairly linearly.
• jartelt 10y ago
  They make the most sense for large installations because you can increase the capacity largely by just increasing the size of the tanks storing the anode/cathode liquids. The rest of the system (pumps, membrane, etc.) stays the same for the most part and can be thought of as a fixed cost that you must pay for regardless of the tank size. So, you can potentially make a really long lasting battery with a low cost/kWh by scaling the tanks so they store a lot of anode/cathode liquid. If you try to make a really small version of a flow battery, the cost of the pumps and membranes and general system stuff will probably dominate and give you a high cost/kWh.