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Flow battery are fantasy right now. No company is actually close. Liquid Air or Liquid Metal batteries maybe. However I would argue LFP based Li battery will

by nickik 5y ago

Flow battery are fantasy right now. No company is actually close. Liquid Air or Liquid Metal batteries maybe. However I would argue LFP based Li battery will likely win the cost battle for quite a while. And we are getting to a point in their scale where they are actually quite relevant for large storage. Li production capacity has come a long way since Tesla battery in Australia.

nl 5y ago
Flow batteries aren't a fantasy. RedFlow is shipping them now and has multiple large sites powered by them. I worked in the same building as them some years back, and they installed backup for the solar system in around 2016 there.
- nickik 5y ago
  Maybe not fantasy. But we are far away from series large scale flow battery for grid storage. Some of the companies who wanted to build large scale flow batteries have had a lot of problems in the last decade and very few to non have managed to do it. RedFlow seems to have some aspiration for grid scale but it seems to just assemblies of smaller batteries, rather then what most companies hope a flow battery for the grid to look like.
  - nl 5y ago
    Aren't all grid scale batteries assemblies of smaller ones? Li ones certainly are! There are lots of advantages to smaller batteries and few (no?) disadvantages. I've never heard that being brought up before.
    - nickik 5y ago
      Well, not many of the flow batteries. The whole main concept why so many people think flow batteries are so awesome for gird storage is that you can basically have a tank size can scale arbitrary. The once that actually have some reasonably big pilot are Vanadium redox battery. There are multiple such batteries being developed. There are also a number of startups who try these flow batteries but try to move away from Vanadium. Li-Ion batteries are collapsing in price so fast, that they have killed of many of these ideas, like the Zebra battery. So newer startups are looking at something cheaper. But the approach of scaling many smaller ones might still work, it just basically defeats the main benefit of flow batteries in the first place.

by nickik 5y ago

nl 5y ago

Flow batteries aren't a fantasy. RedFlow is shipping them now and has multiple large sites powered by them. I worked in the same building as them some years back, and they installed backup for the solar system in around 2016 there.

nickik 5y ago
Maybe not fantasy. But we are far away from series large scale flow battery for grid storage. Some of the companies who wanted to build large scale flow batteries have had a lot of problems in the last decade and very few to non have managed to do it. RedFlow seems to have some aspiration for grid scale but it seems to just assemblies of smaller batteries, rather then what most companies hope a flow battery for the grid to look like.
- nl 5y ago
  Aren't all grid scale batteries assemblies of smaller ones? Li ones certainly are! There are lots of advantages to smaller batteries and few (no?) disadvantages. I've never heard that being brought up before.
  - nickik 5y ago
    Well, not many of the flow batteries. The whole main concept why so many people think flow batteries are so awesome for gird storage is that you can basically have a tank size can scale arbitrary. The once that actually have some reasonably big pilot are Vanadium redox battery. There are multiple such batteries being developed. There are also a number of startups who try these flow batteries but try to move away from Vanadium. Li-Ion batteries are collapsing in price so fast, that they have killed of many of these ideas, like the Zebra battery. So newer startups are looking at something cheaper. But the approach of scaling many smaller ones might still work, it just basically defeats the main benefit of flow batteries in the first place.