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.
Some of the “world’s biggest insurance companies” are investigating the advantages of pairing lithium batteries with ultracapacitors in energy storage systems, which can lower costs and extend battery lifetimes, the CEO of an ultracapacitor maker has said.
