‘It will work, and it’ll be in Australia’: EORA Energy on the future of vanadium flow batteries

EORA Energy launched in the Australian market in April 2026 as a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) developer, positioning long-duration flow battery technology as an alternative to lithium-ion for mining and data centre applications.

Costello says that ambition has not gone away, but the technology has not yet reached a commercially viable price point.

“We just cannot get the numbers down,” he says of current VRFB payback periods, which he puts at around three years even when working with established partners.

“We had several clients, so [they’re] saying it sounds great, we love it,” he says, but notes that one prospective customer’s proximity to residential areas created additional complications that the economics could not yet absorb.

He attributes the cost gap not to any shortage of raw material but to market structure.

“There’s plenty of electrolyte, but it’s just the cost of getting it,” he says, arguing that Chinese manufacturers dominate vanadium electrolyte production because of state subsidies and market scale rather than resource scarcity.

“All the electrolyte is still predominantly produced majority out of China,” he says, naming VRFB manufacturers Invinity, CellCube and Enerflow among those competing for supply.

“The Chinese dominate it because they’ve got the demand of the domain, they get subsidised from state-owned enterprise, and that’s on public record. Nothing secret about it.”

Costello expects that to change.

“We will deploy something in the next 12 months, whether it be here in Australia or offshore,” he says, adding that EORA has plans to source raw material from outside China for future projects.

“It will work, and it’s invented in Australia.”

He adds that he “commends” companies such as Horizon Power that have already committed to vanadium deployments in Western Australia, even as EORA continues to work through the cost curve.

That confidence does not yet extend to the joint venture’s first reference project. Asked to confirm the technology planned for the Norseman gold mine and campsite in Western Australia, Costello says lithium-ion remains the most likely choice, while noting that a handful of emerging alternatives are still some ways from commercial maturity.

“Most likely, most likely,” he says, citing semi-solid-state lithium batteries that use an aqueous solution to reduce fire risk as one example, alongside sodium-ion chemistries he remains sceptical will displace lithium in the Australian market soon.

In his account, the choice of technology for any given project is never settled in advance.

“What is best for the solution? Is there sufficient land to put solar? Is there access to the grid or is it off-grid?” he says.

“We design specifically for what the location, the client, and the requirement are.”

A repeatable model, built around existing diesel infrastructure

That site-specific logic underpins how EORA is building out the rest of the joint venture’s pipeline, which spans mining, data centres, distribution networks and hydro optimisation.

Costello describes a combination of diesel generation, solar, and battery storage, coordinated by EORA’s energy management system (EMS), that the company is piloting at Norseman, supported by a partnership with Weichai, which he calls the world’s largest diesel generator manufacturer. He calls the combination his “Big Mac combo.”

“If you’ve already got existing infrastructure like diesel gensets which have been there, if you can generate power from solar, store it, then you can inject that into firming the load, reducing the use of diesel,” he says, adding that pairing the system with “smarts” through EORA’s controls also reduces wear on generators that otherwise “tend to motor quite a lot.”

The same combination, he argues, applies directly to data centres facing long grid connection queues.

“It’s publicly known that to connect to the grid takes a long time, upwards of 26 to 28 months,” he says.

He describes a portable deployment model built around that gap: “a very efficient, cost-effective diesel generator with a portable solar roll-out,” sized across “half a football field,” generating around 120 kilowatts and paired with a container-sized battery of roughly 200 kilowatts.

“That could power 10 houses,” he says, “enough to kickstart whether it be a micro data centre or a five-to-ten-megawatt data centre before they connect to the grid,” letting operators “offer their clients more access” and “get their cash flow and revenue started sooner rather than later.”

That framing is consistent with an argument Costello has made publicly before. In an op-ed for Energy-Storage.news, he wrote that hybridising storage behind existing diesel generation, rather than replacing it outright, lets remote operators cut fuel consumption without disrupting continuity of supply.

A similar mismatch has emerged at a hydro site EORA is working with in southern Australia, where the operator is required to run turbines and discharge water in the middle of the day despite limited demand and no value in exporting that power to the grid.

“There’s no money for them to put the energy back into the grid when they discharge the water from the turbines in the middle of the day because there’s no demand,” Costello says, calling it “a perfect collision for a mini grid.”

He sees it as an opening for smaller-scale vanadium flow batteries, in the 200kW to 500kW range, which he says are “becoming quite interesting” commercially at that size, to capture the otherwise wasted generation.

Asked where the model goes next, Costello points to Western Australia’s mining camps and Queensland’s Bowen Basin, where accommodation operator Civeo has a large presence, as the clearest near-term opportunities.

“They’re the biggest in the world, in fact,” he says.

He also flags an emerging push into micro data centres of five to ten megawatts, including discussions over a site roughly 100km north of an existing property in Western Australia with strong wind resource, to be paired with battery storage and EORA’s controls.

“They’ve got lots and lots of headland wind,” he says of the site.

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