
German energy company wants to build flow batteries in old natural gas caverns - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/07/german-energy-company-wants-to-build-flow-batteries-in-old-natural-gas-caverns/
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ju-st
120 M€ [[https://www.pv-magazine.de/2017/06/22/ewe-plant-bau-eines-
ba...](https://www.pv-magazine.de/2017/06/22/ewe-plant-bau-eines-
batteriespeicher-mit-120-megawatt-leistung/)]

750 MWh

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160 € per kWh.

LiIon is currently at ~170€/kWh (200USD). LiIon prices will drop more until
2023 but 160€ is still a very good considering this is a research project.

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olegkikin
Tesla Powerwall battery is $5,500 for 14kWh. That's $392/kWh.

Where do you get the $200/kWh batteries from?

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greglindahl
You're comparing a small consumer product to a large industrial installation?
Tesla's Powerpack is an industrial-scale system.

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olegkikin
Tesla Powerwall is a consumer product.

[https://www.tesla.com/powerwall](https://www.tesla.com/powerwall)

~~~
maxerickson
Large installations are a different product:

[https://www.tesla.com/powerpack](https://www.tesla.com/powerpack)

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perlgeek
Wow, this sounds like a promising concept I've never heard of before.

To me, the main three questions are round-trip efficiency, max storage time
and environment impact.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery)
mentions 75% to 80% efficiency, though I don't know how well that applies to
such big systems.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.194...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.194.9741&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
mentions a better environmental profile compared to lead acid batteries, but
that might be a low bar.

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rmason
If this can be proven to work it could be a real difference maker to smooth
out energy swings. I don't know about other areas but here in Michigan we have
a number of abandoned salt gypsum and ore mines that would all be candidates
for this technology.

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maxerickson
There is also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant)

Which is about 10 times the power and more than 10 times the storage of the
proposed battery.

It's currently used to shift baseload generation from nighttime to daytime,
but it could be used to store solar for evening and nighttime use.

The only real blocker to siting more is that people freak out about local
environmental disturbances. It's about 1.5 miles of shore out of hundreds of
miles of dunes.

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mirimir
> German researchers had developed better components for a large, stationary
> battery that used negatively and positively charged liquid electrolyte pools
> to exchange electrons through a reasonably priced membrane.

Seriously? If those electrolyte pools were substantially charged, the
electrostatic forces would be humongous.

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kees99
Yeah, that's messed up. Not only that sounds like a capacitor's description
("negatively and positively charged pools") rather than battery's, but also
"liquid electrolyte" is a patent tautology.

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tehabe
I remember that there were also plans to use the old coal mines in the Ruhr
area as water pump storage batteries. I don't know if this was just an idea or
if someone did a study on how feasible this would be.

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Toboe
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/german-coal-mine-
may...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/german-coal-mine-may-be-prime-
for-pumped-storage/)

> According to Bloomberg, North Rhine-Westphalia State Governor Hannelore
> Kraft recently confirmed that a project to turn the coal mine into pumped
> storage will move forward after mining activities have stopped.

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QAPereo
I've been hearing about Vanadium flow batteries for a long time, and it would
be great to see them finally deployed on this scale.

