
Canada Battery Maker Says Flow Storage Costs to Tumble by Half - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-24/canada-battery-maker-says-flow-storage-costs-to-tumble-by-half
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Animats
They are mostly a vanadium mining company.[1] The price of vanadium just
crashed in the last half of 2018. Maybe that's why the company is promoting
this right now.

[1]
[https://www.cellcubeenergystorage.com/resource-1/](https://www.cellcubeenergystorage.com/resource-1/)

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mtgx
> said the cost of its technology may halve within four years, potentially
> boosting its uptake over lithium-ion units.

Chances are that Li-Ion prices will be reduced by at least as much, if not
much more within 4 years, as the whole carmaking industry starts mass-
producing EVs, and other huge Tesla, European, and Asian battery factories go
online to serve that market of millions of EVs a year.

I think some Chinese battery maker recently said that they expect Li-Ion
battery cell prices to fall to $50/kWh by 2025 (I think they are around
$130-$150 now). It may actually happen a year or two earlier, at least for the
industry leaders, with everyone else following soon after.

Personally, with the rise of all-electric vehicles and solar roofs/home
battery systems (for which Li-Ion is much more convenient), I'm quite
skeptical that other technologies will be able to beat Li-Ion in being used by
power companies. The ecosystem and economies of scale will greatly favor Li-
Ion, for now, and whatever new tech the battery makers decide to adopt later
on (like solid state batteries).

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mhandley
The nice thing about flow batteries is they have the potential to store energy
for long periods while being relatively cost effective. All you need is larger
tanks for the electrolyte. With Li-Ion batteries, the number of batteries you
need scales with the length of time you need to store energy for. So, at some
point you reach a crossover point - if you need to store a month's energy,
you're probably not going to do that with Li-Ion, but it's not inconceivable
with flow batteries (at least assuming the electrolyte itself is relatively
cheap and stable).

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Retric
From a grid storage standpoint longer energy storage just means you have fewer
cycles to make up your investment. More generation tends to be vastly cheaper
then storage in such situations. Some reserve is very useful, but lithium ion
batteries should not be fully discharged regularly which allows for deeper
discharges at higher cost and thus some reserve capacity naturally follows.

Flow batteries might work to replace backup generators, but the cost would
need to fall much further.

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robocat
In some places you could make money trucking electricity in tankers or
shipping it.

> From a grid storage standpoint longer energy storage just means you have
> fewer cycles to make up your investment.

Only true if you are selling on the spot market.

You can also get paid for grid security - your ability to _potentially_
deliver power during extreme load or deliver power to constrained nodes.

For example, you may be paid to install and maintain a whole power station
that is only expected to be used rarely (or ideally not at all if designed for
emergency loads!)

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dragontamer
Load-shifting is the biggest innovation actually. My utility company is giving
out deals to basically control the air-conditioning of some houses. During
emergencies, they prevent the air-conditioner from running... either 50% or
all the way down to 0% cycling (for lowest cost to utility bills)

It caused a bit of controversy when they used their authority to shut off
people's air conditioner, but allegedly it saved the grid of a potential
brownout.

Batteries / Energy Storage is the obvious way to solve the issue. But creative
solutions (ie: controlling people's air conditioners) is more feasible in the
short run, and probably should be deployed more widely.

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joncrane
What kinds of chemicals are in these batteries, and what does
disposal/recycling look like?

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pjc50
Vanadium. Ironically, Vanadium is extracted from the waste products of the
oil, bitumen and steel industries.

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KaiserPro
Have they increased the cycle efficiency? Off the top of my head there is a
round trip efficiency of ~70-80% compared to 85-95+ with Lithium.

However thats on a cycle of <24h for multiple week storage, flow batteries
have much much lower self discharge.

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Jedd
Everything is a tradeoff.

Either cycle efficiency, or number of cycles before storage drops below 80% of
original spec. And storage flow definitely wins on the longevity stakes.

Personally I love the idea of a battery I can scale horizontally with
relatively minimal cost / complexity.

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cogman10
$100->150 is really good. That puts these flow batteries directly in lithium's
territory in terms of cost.

Flow batteries would make excellent grid batteries. I was under the assumption
that cost and manufacturing were the prime limiters.

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Brakenshire
I don’t understand how you can make the comparison.

A lithium battery has a limited capacity, so you look at the cost per unit
energy at a 100% charge. But flow batteries never get ‘full’, they can carry
on storing energy until you fill a silo up. I could see a direct comparison on
a power basis, or on an levelized cost basis, but those aren’t usually the
figures used to index lithium batteries.

Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. It would be fantastic news if flow
batteries became competitive.

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StavrosK
What do you mean? How can they not get full?

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ip26
You can continue to charge more electrolyte for as long as you can supply
more, & stash the charged electrolyte somewhere. It's not a unit the way a
lithium ion battery is.

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StavrosK
Oh wow, really? You can just disconnect the electrolyte and store it and it
will stay charged? What's the discharge rate on that like?

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marcosdumay
It doesn't stay charged. You push the more active reactants into it, it gets
charged while it reacts the reactants into the less active version.

It is like a diesel powered generator, where you push diesel and oxygen into
it, it creates power while it reacts them both. The difference is that flow
batteries also do the reverse reaction, so you can get the original reactants
back.

About how long it will stay charged, it does not discharge like a normal
battery, but active reactants have a shelf-life.

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StavrosK
I see, thank you. With those properties, I can see why it would be ideal for
home energy storage.

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marcosdumay
Currently, they don't look great for many applications. But on principle they
should be the best option for any stationary application.

What we are seeing here is that real vs. possible gap getting smaller.

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rocky1138
Why?

