The developing economies of the world are largely located in geographical regions that have abundant renewable energy resources, be they solar, wind, hydro or in some cases geothermal, yet paradoxically at the individual and rural community level, access to energy is often a very real issue. Establishing a continuous chain of temperature controlled cold environments from the point of harvest to the marketplace and on into the home, a ‘cold chain’, is what is required in order to avoid produce spoilage and to connect farmers with higher value market options in distant urban centres or overseas.
Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has acquired energy storage company Sun Catalyx, which was founded by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and has recently been developing flow batteries for grid storage.
A team at Harvard is pursuing a metal-free battery chemistry based on organic molecules called Quinones. The technology potentially offers an abundant and safe material to use for scaling up flow batteries, but according to the energy storage team at Lux Research in Boston, there are significant limitations based on project cost.
India looks to be the latest country to examine installing energy storage at the top level, with the Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL) actively seeking demonstration projects and the country’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) inviting comments from stakeholders ahead of similar plans.
Earlier this year New York governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled plans for an “energy modernisation initiative that will fundamentally transform the way electricity is distributed and used in New York State”. This will include the creation of a leading energy storage marketplace, argues Bill Radvak, chief executive officer of American Vanadium, whose company recently installed a vanadium flow battery storage system for New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority in Manhattan.
PV Tech Storage interviewed Bill Radvak of American Vanadium, whose company has a plan to scale up flow batteries for renewable energy integration, using its own vanadium deposits.
The International Electrochemical Commission (IEC) will begin a programme of standardisation for redox flow batteries – which can be used for large scale energy storage applications – following discussions which were initiated in Japan in October 2013.
