No More Bat Flatteries

[Hallam]

https://amp.abc.net.au/article/101911604

Vanadium redox flow batteries can provide cheap, large-scale grid energy storage. Here's how they work


The rise of renewable energy has exposed a new problem: energy storage.
Solar and wind can generate very cheap electricity, but they're intermittent. For entire grids to run on renewables, enormous amounts of storage are needed to avoid blackouts.
The two main options, pumped hydro and lithium-ion batteries, each have their drawbacks, such as high costs.
Fortunately, there may be a third option.
A type of battery invented by an Australian professor in the 1980s has been growing in prominence, and is now being touted as part of the solution to this storage problem.
Called a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), it's cheaper, safer and longer-lasting than lithium-ion cells.
Here's why they may be a big part of the future — and why you may never see one.
'We were 20 years too early'

In the 1970s, during an era of energy price shocks, NASA began designing a new type of liquid battery.
The iron-chromium redox flow battery contained no corrosive elements and was designed to be easily scalable, so it could store huge amounts of solar energy indefinitely……

………cont, follow the link above.

[Garret]

OK - so it won't do cars & trucks - but gigawatt storage for renewables is a huge deal.

[Hallam]

A game changer for storage. Up in the high country the Australian Govt has a project to to use solar during daylight to pump water to a higher elevation so it can be fed back downstream through turbines during the night as a method of storing solar power.The project is referred to as Snowy 2,and one of my sons was a machinery operator there for a while Snowy 2 Not the most efficient storage but in the absence of better alternatives it was given the go ahead. Looks like this battery will make future snowy 2 type solutions somewhat redundant. However I read this thinking what’s the catch? Is there some element to why there is not more of a song and dance as to its potential?

[MushCreek]

But what about the five year old kids being forced to work in open pit vanadium mines in third world countries?

[Dave Hadfield]

True. Most people don’t realize that the electricity for their light bulbs was generated half a second earlier.

We don’t have any system-wide way of storing electricity.