A vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) with a 24-hour discharge duration will be built and tested in a project launched by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and VRFB technology provider Invinity Energy Systems.
Europe-based organic flow battery company CMBlu has won its second US project, a 5MW, 10-hour duration pilot system with Arizona utility Salt River Project (SRP).
A seven-year observation of a vanadium flow battery in California from Sumitomo Electric has been completed, while US lab PNNL has found an alternative, food-based electrolyte which it said boosted capacity and longevity.
Lithium-ion will struggle to compete at long durations and its price declines cannot continue forever, said Alan Greenshields, Director EMEA for iron electrolyte flow battery supplier ESS Inc, in a rebuttal to an earlier Energy-storage.news article on the topic.
First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.
