
Vanadium: The metal that may soon be powering your neighbourhood - Libertatea
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27829874
======
ender7
I suppose it's my turn to link to another effort in this area, liquid salt
batteries:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy)

They have the advantage of being much cheaper to manufacture, but I don't know
how their energy density stacks up.

~~~
afarrell
[http://www.ambri.com/](http://www.ambri.com/) is the company that is bringing
this tech to production.

Also, Donald Sadoway is a great teacher.

------
XorNot
I've been hearing about these types of batteries for years (they were
developed at UNSW where I attended) but the technology has been unviable ever
since then.

The problem, near as I can tell, is that even with the benefits, vanadium is
still too expensive. It would cost ~$80,000 or more in conc. vanadium for
storing 100 kwH - just enough energy to keep a house safely off the grid.

To that price you have to add the solar system to charge it, the cell stack,
the conc. H2SO4 you have to dissolve the vanadium in etc.

We need to get way cheaper then that before we can get serious about this -
ideally cheap enough that we can encourage everyone to have a cell stack in
their house that offsets their peak loads. That would open up some real
options.

~~~
stcredzero
How about $100,000 per a couple dozen houses?

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discreteevent
From the article in reference to sea squirts that digest vanadium: "Having
committed themselves to this life of tedium, they also digest their redundant
brains" . --- There are times in life where being able to do this temporarily
would certainly be a relief :)

~~~
EdwardCoffin
This is the subject of a classic joke about tenure:

 _“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable
rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task,
it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it
doesn 't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting
tenure.”_

[http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52415-the-juvenile-sea-
squir...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52415-the-juvenile-sea-squirt-
wanders-through-the-sea-searching-for)

------
Nanzikambe
(Disclaimer: I know very little about either Vanadium or the alternatives I
will suggest, so these are the opinions of a lay person on the subject)

Why is yet another mineral we have to mine, then presumably buy from an
industry that will become another iteration of today's energy giants, the
solution?

What is wrong with present methodologies of energy storage? For example using
surplus power to pump water up hill, to later recuperate during peak hours? Or
heating water? Things of that vein that're obviously not efficient, but
trivial enough to implement for single buildings (whether a house or a sky
scraper) without needing any change to infrastructure.

To be clear, what I'm against here is the creation of demand for yet another
substance we'll despoil the planet some more for. Mines are festering wounds
upon the planet. And I seriously doubt harvesting sea creatures will lead to
anything more than the same sort of damage inflicted upon a seabed already
scarred by dragnets.

Edit: From reading further, and to answer my own question, the problem is that
all research in this field is geared towards the identification of materials
or energy sources that can be commoditised.

~~~
Tarrosion
> What is wrong with present methodologies of energy storage? For example
> using surplus power to pump water up hill, to later recuperate during peak
> hours?

Say you want to store 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity (most places in the
United States, about $0.12 worth). That's 3.6 million joules of energy. The
potential energy gained by moving an object away from the Earth is
approximately m * g * h, were m is mass, g gravity, and h height. g is
approximately 10, and in a home system let's say h is also approximately 10.
Probably less. Then the amount of water you need to move is approximately
36,000 kilograms. At 1 kilogram per liter, that's 36,000 liters or
approximately 9,000 gallons. For comparison, that's roughly the size of a
moderate swimming pool.

And of course, there are many other problems: converting electricity to pump
action to water movement to potential energy back to electricity is not 100%
efficient. That much water is extremely heavy; there's a reason swimming pools
are often built in the ground. Etc. And all that for just 1 kilowatt hour!

My urban apartment uses O(10) kilowatt hours per day, so even if only a small
fraction of that must be stored, my roommate and I would require a swimming
pool or three. Hard to find space in a city...this could all be done remotely,
but then transmission loss cuts the efficiency further.

~~~
colanderman
Not really relevant to the discussion, but O(10) doesn't mean "approximately
10".

O(f(x)) denotes a function that is bounded by a constant multiple of f(x), and
really only makes sense in the context of a dependent variable x. (e.g. O(2^x)
denotes an exponential-bounded relationship with x).

So O(10) in the above context effectively means your apartment uses some
unknown number of kWh.

~~~
dhimes
When dealing with numbers, the notation means "order of magnitude," which is
the nearest power of 10. Strictly, this places is between 5 and 50 (4 rounds
down to 1, 51 rounds up to 100).

Most people use it a little more loosely in conversation. More than 1, not
100, etc.

~~~
dllthomas
While I've occasionally seen O(...) used to mean "approximate upper bound" or
even "approximate bound" in a more general way than the math for Big-O
notation would permit, I've assumed it was either error or analogy, not a
specific other function. Can you give a citation for this being an established
usage?

(Note that I'm certainly familiar with orders of magnitude, just not this
notation for them.)

~~~
dhimes
It may be informal. I seem to recall people also using ~ for this, as in

 _" The detector is measuring eV, but this effect is ~ meV |O(meV) so we won't
see it."_

------
zvrba
Interesting. Vanadium is relatively abundant too; Wikipedia places it on 20th
place, ahead of more known and very widely used elements like chromium, nickel
and zinc, copper and tin (on the 49th place!).

This might be viable for mass-production.

------
planckscnst
Knight describes the color changes as the vanadium is reduced - yellow ->
green -> blue -> violet as the vanadium receives electrons from the zinc. But
then later, he describes the battery. "In one tank, the vanadium releases
electrons, turning from yellow to blue." At least one of these statements are
incorrect.

~~~
avn2109
>> "One of these statements are incorrect"

One _or more_ are incorrect :)

~~~
thomasvarney723
"At least one of these statements are incorrect."

------
giarc
The article states that peak demand is the evening... I would have thought
peak demand would have been during the day when large factories are operating
at peak output.

~~~
jarvist
Large industrial users don't vary their demand much, and actually change when
they use it to fit the demand curves (i.e. Aluminium smelters).

Peak in the UK is early evening, when people are still working late & also
people returning home (electric trains), heating houses, dinner, doing laundry
etc.

[http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/](http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/)

~~~
zhte415
This is an amazingly hands-on dashboard. Together with handy tips on why and
when peaks and troughs occur. For example I had no idea UK wind potential
(potential) capacity was so close to nuclear.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Yep, and look at the graphs. Look at the yearly graph at the bottom, nuclear
output averages 6.0 - 7.0GW, wind output averages about 2.0 - 2.5GW over a 12
month period, for about the same nameplate capacity (installed nameplate
capacity: Wind 8GW; Nuclear 12GW - close enough to support the following
argument).

This means we have to overbuild wind capacity by a factor of about 3 to 4 in
order to match nuclear / coal / gas.

Now have a think about how much steel and concrete are required to build 1GW
of wind _base load_ capacity compared to 1GW base load nuclear. You need to
build, say, 3x 640MW reactors to achieve 1GW continuous output, so 1 reactor
can be offline for refuelling or maintenance at any one time, while the other
two are run at 80% capacity. To achieve 1GW of base load wind you need to
build 3 to 4GW nameplate capacity, and even then the wind doesn't blow all the
time, so you need widely dispersed wind, plus storage because sometimes the
wind doesn't blow anywhere in the UK for days on end - the currently weekly
graph shows this: wind has been producing approximately 0GW output for most of
the last week. Also, wind needs _long_ new transmission lines, (large) nuclear
can be a drop in replacement for existing coal plants as they are retired, or
built next / close to existing transmission lines.

There are plenty of resources on the web that will help you discover the
materials inputs for different generating technologies, see
bravenewlcimate.com particularly [1] for example.

Regardless of what technology we choose moving forward, to achieve zero
emissions by 2050 would require a war-like rollout, starting now. But wind and
solar are at least a couple of magnitudes of order more materials-intensive
than nuclear / coal / gas for the same base load output. And there probably
aren't that many sites suitable for wind, especially ones that don't require
1000km new transmission lines.

I'm not against renewables per se, I'm just _for_ math. The idea of 'renewable
resources' appeals to me. But until the math magically changes, I don't see
how wind and solar (with or without storage) is a good idea, either
environmentally from the materials-input perspective, or economically from the
end-users perspective. What we need to push us forward technologically is
large amounts of cheap / free zero emissions -when generating- electricity.

Another strike against wind and solar is this: if either was so attractive
economically then large investment funds would have flooded the market with
the technology. But it isn't, which speaks directly about the ROI (Return on
Investment), which is derived from materials input and running cost per dollar
return. The only way it makes sense economically to build wind and solar is if
the price of electricity goes up, which is ideal if you want people to freeze
to death or die of heat stroke, or make your electric car uneconomical to run.

I think that UK National Grid Status webpage is the best example of wind _not
working_ as a solution to electricity supply, unless you define the problem as
"how to make expensive unreliable electricity" a la Germany and Denmark [2],
who have the highest wind electricity generation in Europe and the most
expensive electricity in Europe [3].

I may have waffled on more than I originally intended.

1\.
[http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/](http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/)

2\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Unio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Union)

3\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing)

Edit: speeling nd grama

~~~
Derbasti
The UK is a bad place for solar power. Spain or Egypt would have much higher,
and more reliable, output, that could be more easily predicted and buffered. I
have heard figures like 4x between spain and the UK.

What about tidal power? That should work well in the UK.

~~~
xyzzyz
available tidal energy is relatively low, on the order of handful kWh per day
per UK citizen. extracting all available tidal energy would require
extraordinary investment. in effect, it's unrealistic to expect more than 1-2
kWh per day per person. solar and wind are much better bets, though neither is
on par with coal.

I recommend reading this book: www.withouthotair.com/ it contains nice
estimates of energy used by UK people on the one hand, and energy available
from various sustainable sources.

------
inportb
> ... peak demand for electricity, which generally comes in the late afternoon
> and evening, when everyone travels home, turns on the lights, heating or air
> conditioning, boils the kettle, bungs dinner in the microwave, and so on

Related video:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatime...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml)

------
stephenmm
While researching this I found a tremendous resource that goes in to pretty
good depth of all the alternatives for grid level storage:

[http://www.sbc.slb.com/SBCInstitute/Publications/~/media/Fil...](http://www.sbc.slb.com/SBCInstitute/Publications/~/media/Files/SBC%20Energy%20Institute/SBC%20Energy%20Institute_Electricity_Storage%20Factbook_vf.ashx)

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Only good thing is that it can take a lot of charge cycles, otherwise it's
worse on all aspects, than even traditional lead-acid batteries.

~~~
jarvist
No, it's a reflow battery - meaning you can make the capacity arbitrarily
large (literally you have a tank of one redox, a tank of another). Hopefully
this will make it much cheaper for large capacities.

Yes, it's heavy for the capacity, but this does not matter for fixed
installations.

Number of charge cycles & recycle-ability makes an enormous difference to the
balance of systems cost for a battery.

~~~
shabble
I wonder how stable the "charged" state solution is?

Could you charge it up in one location, and truck/ship/pump it somewhere else
for consumption? Imagine refitting crude oil supertankers to handle the
acidity and ship solar power from some remote coastal desert to more useful
places. Other than the headmelting price of Va, it could conceivably be
cheaper than building transmission lines & their associated resistance losses.

(I'm probably missing some key fact of why this wouldn't work. But it's a nice
idea)

~~~
ScottBurson
That would be so much less efficient than transporting hydrocarbon fuels as to
be pointless.

------
callesgg
You Will still lose some 20 + 20% due to charge and discharge inefficiencies.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery)

------
ape4
Do Brits really say "bungs dinner in the microwave" ?

~~~
vacri
Antipodeans, too. Without the 's' \- the 's' is just an artifact of how the
sentence in the article reads. 'bung' just means 'casually put somewhere'.
"Where do you want this box?" => "Just bung it on the table"

