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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 batter
by 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 agoAren'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 agoWell, 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.