FLOW batteries are experiential, and FLOW batteries difficult to scale. Tesla MEGAPACK is already profitable, and Tesla will reduce costs with LFP cells. FLOW batteries is FAKE NEWS.
funfact, germany tries to put lignin in these batteries....a waste product in wood production. In Germany we used the same product for plastic products. So we are able to make a battery with wood-based plastic containers and parts and with a wood-based waste product to store energy in them..... and now the game breaker....we could potential do this underground in former massive gas caves too. :D the technology is not fully there, but in lets say 10-20 years we could solve thereby the energy storing problem for solar and wind-energy.....we just need to plant some more trees....and we have to plant more trees to counter the heating of climatic change. oh and these batteries are easily recycled, this is the actual problem to create these batteries without having these batteries to be exchanged after like 5 years. And they get more efficient every year. So maybe we want to exchange them every 5 years to get the improved versions.
I’m an old mechanical engineer and have been into this stuff for 30 years….This seems like the best option I’ve seen so far - it will be low cost, will last for a very lomg time, will not mess up the environment and will provide power over a long duration - time to invest!!!
Do your homework before sinking any money into flow batteries. I worked on an Imergy (now bankrupt) vanadium redox battery a few years back. Energy efficiency was an awful 60% due to the pumps and fans. Efficiency only gets worse if you're not cycling it daily. I know they sold a lot of them in India because of their unreliable grid. There are few viable use cases IMO.
@@lkytmryan I'm concerned that Nuclear will end up making a small handful of people rich, they will control the power, who gets it, who doesn't and what does it cost. Solar/Wind have a much better chance for a power to belong to everyone. That being said, I think we will end up with a baseline of Nuclear. I think it would be smart to have a baseline supply of nuclear in the 25% range. There has been a lot of work to make nuclear safer, more modular and more affordable. With just normal innovation/improvement on the combination of wind, solar and storage it will increasingly difficult for nuclear to compete from a straight economics standpoint. With Elon's mega-packs they can't compete now.
@@lkytmryan I don't think "party" has anything to do with the general failures of the human intellect that include confirmation bias. Yes, the left may tend to have more "anti-nuclear", but the right has the "anti-vaccine". These are just two examples of a single aspect of a much larger group of logical failures. Tribalism, Dunning-Krueger... the list is long and exhausting. I personally agree that from a purely statistical and scientific aspect, Nuclear should be a part of the solution.
You've done a really good job walking us through the engineering and business tradeoffs, which is a breath of fresh air not just on UA-cam, but in technology reporting generally. Thank you for this work!
@@TwoBitDaVinci Some real numbers would have been nice. For now this is just a pay in sky type of technology. For example: - How many ton of raw material is needed to store a GW/hour? - What is the largest installation they have done. - How long have they run at what cost. Not projected cost, but some real numbers - How has the cost scaled from the start until the latest installations. - What factor they expect for maintenance cost compared to installation cost.
@@bknesheim Here: ??????????? - I recently stocked up on them. Take those. Don't worry about returning them. I have plenty, and they're free where I'm from.
I have been following this technology from the beginning. It's the only battery worth using for grid storage. 40 years from now I think you will see them being used in homes too.
It looks very promising for grid-scale storage. I like the concept, particularly the design flexibility. One could imagine having a large plant-like installation where the proton pump and electrolyte massaging is done on a larger scale, I don't see any particular advantage in the shipping container model where each container must replicate the mechanical bits. At least not for something like this. It makes sense for a lithium cell, but any time you have mechanical components you have to think about economies of scale. -Matt
They have two basic set ups. Their original solution was in a small 20' con-ex that grew to a 40' container that was stackable up to 2 or 3 units high. They still offer the container units, but their focus is buildouts indoors with the electrolyte solution stored outside in tanks. There are still applications for the con-ex solution, especially for temp solutions or dispatchable solutions in an area that has lost transmission, such as after a hurricane or other natural disaster. They may also be preferable to a facility that doesn't have indoor capacity but a large lot.
The shipping container model gives you modularity.. Need to expand? Truck in a container, or five or ten . Pumps starting to wear out? Replace one container at a time without shutting down your entire storage. And the other advantage of modularity .. economy of production scale. Instead of a custom-sized build for each customer depending on how big they are, you can build and/or order batches of identical parts and crank these things out assembly-line style.
How about numbers to compare with other battery farms: size, weight, maintenance cost, etc. What percentage of output powers the kidney pumps? Are the reusing shipping containers? Can one large tank replace many small tanks? Temperature impacts? GREAT TOPIC!
@@harshbatheja I assume that you are referring to RT or "round trip" efficiencies? That is the aspect with ESS and other flow cell technologies that most influence the LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) They are not as efficient as Lithium Ion forms and that is one aspect that influences the need to increase size to offset the value. It is also an aspect of energy density. Generally, they tend to be in the 70% to 75% range which is less than other common types of storage but as the value does not decrease with each cycle, there is a large cost savings over the duration of the project. The real gain in value is that while the size of the connection, say 1MW will require a bit more space than the same value of Lithium Ion, the gain in time (MWhrs) is far, far better than Lithium Ion for example, Lithium Ion is generally set on a 2hr value (1MW over 2 hrs is equal to 2MWhrs). For the Lithium model, to go to 4 hrs would require doubling the number of batteries and thus size, the ESS system is just more electrolyte in the existing package. This goes up to about 12 hrs per package for ESS. Imagine the number of Lithium Ion batteries required for a 12 hr discharge capability? Another benefit of ESS is that you can completely discharge the battery (last 10% with a voltage drop) without damaging the cells. Just recharge and off you go. Sorry, I am excited for these guys. A GW or 2 of storage, strategically placed in the ERCOT market, could have solved so many of the problems from last year.
@@ScottLaneSabineParish Well, here in the UK, everyone is raving about 'green hydrogen' and how we can use our renewables to make it for use in fuel cell vehicles as well as to replace our serious dependance on natural gas and kerosene for hot water and space heating (which accounts for about 70% of the UKs total energy use). So, even at 75% RT efficiency, it is 2.5 times better than green H2's 30% (at best). The infrastructure cost of flow batteries would also be a fraction of H2's...
I've been following Redflow batteries in Australia fer at least 12 years waiting for them to become viable. So many benefits at the cost of a little extra space.
I have been watching many videos about solar panels, and climate change and I've been worried about the storage problem for solar, watching this new solution being developed feels great!!!!
From an ecological standpoint, hydrogen distribution and storage make far more sense. Eliminate high voltage transmission entirely, eliminate battery chemicals altogether, safe storage.
I recently passed by a wind generator farm with several hundred wind mills that stretched over twenty miles along the highway. I think that is the type of system that would benefit from this new technology. Thank you for sharing this with us.
I remember the first time I saw a wind farm along a freeway back in 2002. I was told that it, and many other wind farms in California were completely un-used because they weren't able to connect them. I now know that what they were missing then is still missing now, energy storage on a scale that will actually work with wind.
@@darkestaxe3415 In Europe at that time we had also problems to conect offshore windfarms because the huge DC-Transformer for multible KilovoltTransmission didnt work flawless yet. These days that shouldnt be the problem anymore. But yess Storage is the key for renewables.
At first I recoiled *hard* when you said these weren't feasible for home use... But then I started thinking about municipal grids, with every small town, or ward of a city has its own grid powered by its own energy sources and stored in its own local iron flow battery bank, and that could be cool. Bringing the grid down to community levels
I just love how things are changing. How sustainable, easily procurable and environment friendly a new technology is, is one of the main questions in the interview.
Neat video- Powerwalls do have moving parts, coolant pump and fans (I believe you said “…no moving parts”) it’s definitely important that residential systems have little to no maintenance, Tesla plus most other modern residential systems are effectively maintenance free, there are differences of course.
I like everything about this battery technology except how many moving parts it has. The battery's chemistry may last a long time but what is the expected failure rate of the least durable unit in that mechanical system?
Same. I saw tubes marked 'hydrogen' during the video when they showed the 'kidneys'. That usually doesn't bode well for long term stability of anything that comes into contact with (embrittlement)
All power generating facilities have tons of moving parts, because they all generate electricity by spinning up turbines using flow of steam, water, or air. The exception is solar panels, and that's only when assuming you don't rotate the array towards the sun (which is arguably much less prone to errors than spinning up a reactor to 50 rotations per second). So, I'd say this new complexity is literally just replacing the old complexity and the net is at 0, especially if used in conjunction with solar panels. As compared to other batteries... well, it'd be nice if we discovered an even better way, but alas, lithium is gonna get damn expensive if we use it at this scale.
@@btCharlie_ That seems like apples to oranges comparison to me. We aren't talking about the generation of the power. We are talking about a buffering system to allow a steady stream of energy from an unsteady source and that component is addressed more simply with other forms of battery storage that don't have many if any moving parts. I still want to know the expected failure rate of the least durable unit in that mechanical system and/or the fail rate of each of the components i.e. how much labor and replacement cost is expected vs battery systems without so many moving parts?
@@davidmcelvain1394 Sorry, I might've made my point more convoluted than it needed to be - sure, you could use a lithium-ion array combined with solar panels and you'd have nearly no moving parts at all, but moving parts in and of themselves aren't really that big a deal, because the current mass energy generation is done with many, many moving parts and it works just fine even with the maintenance costs. And more broadly speaking, I kind of doubt the maintenance costs would outweigh the price of more exotic materials once you'd start working with them at scale, though sure, that's just a guess. I would definitely like to know the specs of the all the parts and how they compare to other batteries regardless of whether they may pose an issue or not. Lastly, if a technology pops up that is both cheap and straightforward, that'd be just great. Sadly, it hasn't done so yet.
@@peterzerfass4609 Huge amounts of hydrogen are stored and transported in industry to make ammonia for fertilizer. The industry uses mild (low carbon) steel without problems or "embrittlement" which is apparently something Big Oil has tried to use to scare people with F U D. This is nonsense. The only concerns are, as he said, the pumps and equipment with moving parts. One other thing that seems to be a concern is that not connecting batteries in series means that the 1.1 volts DC must have large copper conductors so it might take a lot of copper for the electronics.
@@westtexas806 It's not like it even matters if they fuck it. We already have cheap reliable power, people just choose to hate it. It's hilarious how people create a problem then act like it's actually important to get their fabricated problem fixed.
@@bobbygetsbanned6049 Coal is not cheap, it comes with some heavy pollution which has a cost. Nuclear is not cheap, it comes with heavy regulations (which is good, otherwise it wouldn't be reliable). Wind, solar and hydro complement each other very well, but you need SOME base load, and a few installations like that will be enough once wind, solar and hydro are widespread enough. Hydro CAN be a long term base load, if dams are installed. But those are not cheap, and come with some disadvantages. For minimal dam size in rivers, hydro can still be a short term base load, but right now here in Norway it's a dry spell and we're paying through the nose for our cheap hydro power. Gas and oil are better than coal, but not by that much.Unfortunately we're also exporting power to other european countries due to existing trade agreements, so we're REALLY gonna see some high prices when it gets cold in two months time. A good solution is probably to use pumped hydro where you can, batteries and solar+wind where you can't. And if you're Germany and decide to close down new power plants instead of the old ones, and also to phase out nuclear before coal, you can bugger off.
I'm not sure I view this as a flow battery. It's capacity is limited by the amount of iron plated onto the anode. Once charged, the cell cannot charge more by swapping tanks. The similar is true for discharge, once the Fe is dissolved, one cannot swap a tank and continue to discharge. The cell itself determines capacity as well as power. Nothing is mentioned as to tradeoffs in capacity vs. power when designing the cell. I can't tell if there should be any or if the cell can be arbitrarily thick in order to permit plating of a large volume of iron.
Yeah, they didn't mention peak power - one of the other highlights of lithium ion. The system needs to be capable of doing a full charge/discharge cycle in half a day at most or it's kind of useless for short-term storage.
Another significant problem with this type of battery is dendrite growth. As the battery charges and metal is plated onto the anode, it doesn't plate in a flat surface but can grow spikes. it is difficult to prevent these spikes eventually growing across the battery to the cathode and short circuiting the battery. I'm sure they have a way of dealing with it, but it's one of the secrets behind their system.
It should be referred to as a plating battery. There is another one using Zinc Bromide which comes from Redflow in Australia. Quite a different concept than a flow battery.
Looks good. I'll be even more excited once they go to production, as so many times we hear about new battery technologies, and then they run into problems before they make it to market. Wishing these folks all the best.
Good presentation. As far as domestic applications are concerned I would not be too quick to dismiss this potential use. Consider refrigeration and air-conditioning. When they were first invented they were huge noisy machines that required much maintenance and now every house virtually has at least one of each. Maybe they can refine these flow batteries for smaller utilities and homes.
Good point. And let's not forget the possibilities of nanomachine technology. It may be, in some (far?) distant future, we have inexpensive, non-toxic, scalable power cells made up of hundreds, thousands, or millions of microscopic ion pump batteries with nanopumps moving a few molecules of an electrolyte across a few molecules of iron - producing tiny fractions of a volt each - but fully scalable (on micro and macro levels), and good for decades. "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Henry David Thoreau
I came across ESS a few years ago and was really excited, but nothing really seemed to happen with them. Still hoping they take off, it is really cool tech.
Great video! Storage on a huge scale is, of course, the critical link in renewable energy - there’s more than enough energy available from the sun in solar panels and wind provided it can be kept until needed. There are many chemistries that hold promise if the requirement for high energy density is not an issue: exciting times ahead.
I have been responding to utility scale RFP's with an ESS product option for about 7 years. They have almost always gone with a short duration, higher LCOE lithium Ion option. Why? Exposure to media and because everyone they know does it that way. It has been frustrating and I suck at sales. I have been an avid ESS convert since about 2015 and a big shout out to my friends with ESS. Also congrats on the $300M contract and time to expand again!
Both this video and the website fail to show any details of what makes the solution uniquely capable. It would seem well suited for long duration storage (perhaps even beyond the day /night cycle) but without public information and reference installs I can see why people would be skeptical. Lion is relatively proven. Solutions like this, green hydrogen, cryogenic air, aluminum air, sodium batteries and the ambri liquid metal battery are all great in theory but need hard numbers and strong reference clients to take off at economical scale. Market confidence will require basically gifting it to a startup client (requires capital) or two, more open marketing and a strong technical advantage. Details like round trip efficiency, cost, maintenance projections, modularity, power, energy, response speed and losses for long term storage are critical. Snake oil solutions have managed to secure contracts and failed misurably which obviously makes people nervous (ie stacking heavy concrete blocks then deconstructing it)
If you are interested, I can google some info for you. To be brutally honest, most of us are lazy and won't do our homework. For most of the projects that I have offered ESS as an LiIon alternative, the data, resources, access to data, etc., were available, but most corporations at a certain size, will develop a culture of "don't rock the boat" and don't do more than you have to. I know that many of the proposals were considered, but in the end, the engineering review's had to sell it to management and then possibly reissue the RFP for others to list as an option and it was just easier and quicker to use LiIon. That and I am just not a salesperson.
You didn't mention whether or not these batteries can be charged to 100% and discharged to zero without any damage. Presumably, they would be similar to the ZnBr plating batteries which can be fully charged and discharged. They are made by Redflow in Australia and come in 10kWh units that are suitable for homes, either singly or severally.
They have tanks of electrolyte so they can scale the tank size to make the battery run longer. It doesn't seem to need to be charged to 100% and discharged to zero.
That is a good point about Redflow ZnBr flow battery 100% discharge. Here another good point on the electrochemistry of why battery power goes down, i.e. the buildup of charge imbalance decreases overall charge imbalance between anode and cathode, and how flow batteries can use mitigating techniques to address the imbalance. I would be interesting to see if Redflow is also looking into any charge imbalance mitigation for ZnBr.
I am a huge fan of flow batteries and using such abundant materials is the path. You did a great job with tank size and pump size for power over time and power. I hope you will keep up with these folks. Thank you Ricky!
This will be a gamechanger. No airconditioning needs, no hazmat license, no fire suppression, these all add up, and theyve said the life expectancy is 25-30 years, not that it loses capacity but they figured over that much time it's probably a good idea to replace the tanks. It's often not 'the best' tech that is mass adopted, but the most affordable and this has to check so many boxes for utility companies. I would love to see ESS develop a residential battery and would buy one fast based on the lack of fire, toxicity or explosions and a life expectancy so long it would actually add value to a home, unlike the Li-ion batteries I see
Great video, huge flow battery fan. A suggestion for a future video is charging highways for electric vehicles, it seems every time anyone talks electric, it comes down to charging times and range anxiety.
Seems like they could get more energy out of the iron by just oxiding it in a tank of salt water. If a kilogram of iron releases about 10 million Joules of energy when it is converted into Iron II Oxide, and a heat engine could capture the energy and convert it into electricity with 36% efficiency, the electrical energy would be about 1kilowatt hiour/kilogram. So a tank of salt water with oxygen bubbled into it that could rust iron dust at 1 kilogram per minute could power an 80 hp electric motor. Since the iron oxide is so much heavier than the water, it would settle to the bottom of the tank. Or it could be separated with a magnet. If it was heated up in a crucible to a high enough temperature, the oxygen would be removed which is like recharging it. While it was melted, it could be turned back into dust by making a fine spray of it. Iron ore costs about $100/ton. Gasoline costs about $1400 a ton and is not so easy to recycle. Concentrated solar used to heat up the rust dust in a crucible and remove the oxygen might use 90% of the heat which would be like using ten times as much electrical energy from 20% efficient solar panels if the electrical recharging process is only 50% efficient. So one cubic meter iof ron would store about as much energy as two cubic meters of gasoline or ten cubic meters of hot water heated to near the boiling point. Blood uses iron to transport oxygen. The iron dust would be a lot like blood cells. Water expands when heated. A wine bottle filled with water into the neck will show about an inch of expansion into the neck when heated about 50°C. This could be harnessed by a hydraulic piston to drive a fluid turbine with tremendous force. It could be much smaller than a steam turbine and not require such high temperature operation. But the efficiency might be much higher than a steam turbine for converting heat to electricity because there is not the wasted energy from propelling a large volume of water to a high velocity, much of which cannot be recovered. A giant hydraulic piston forcing a small stream of water under zillions of tons of pressure through a water turbine could be built right into the tank if salt water and iron dust making the whole system lighter and smaller and less expensive. If a big tank of water expanded a piston one meter with a thousand tons of force on it, it would generate about ten million Joules. If a wine bottle expands water about an inch up the neck for 50 °C, then a one cubic meter tank would expand the water through a wine bottle neck cylinder about 20 meters. Those little music boxes have a big gear with a worm gear at the end of the drive train that Spins at zillions of rpm's if you put a big. force on the big cylinder with the pins sticking out that prick the little metal bars to make the music. One kilogram of iron would heat up the cubic meter of water about 2°C which would push the piston about one meter. A thousand tons of force times one meter is about ten million Joules. But what mechanical gear system could with stand 1000 tons of force? If instead the water was forced through a small hole to drive a tiny turbine with a flow rate of 3000m/sec, the energy generated at 30%efficiency would be about 3 million Joules which is close to 1 kwh. So if there was a big cylinder with a separation in the middle that house a turbine powered by a thin stream of high pressure water, the water could just be pushed back and forth through the turbine as one side iwas heated and the other cooled. Apparently it must be more efficient and easier to drive a steam turbine than a water turbine. Or maybe not. The low temperature operation would be an advantage and it might be much smaller, lighter, and less expensive. Maybe you can power an EV with it. It depends on oxygen and temperature difference and there is an unlimited supply of air and air temperature cooling.
This was a good video, and I do like ESS' tech, but they are very much an outlier as far as flow batteries go. If you are going to do a video about flow batteries, the focus really should be on "standard" vanadium flow batteries, which have been installed for utility use. Good stuff.
@@TwoBitDaVinci you are doing great and im rooting for you. Your technology is one of the cleanest in the world ive seen. The answers to the energy needs will come from different sources. At least for now. Keep going and know there is a need for your system. Where there is a will there is a way. Custoner support will be key to building your business
I think we're overestimating how much maintenance is going to have to actually be performed on a system like this. Industrial pumps are really reliable machines, they can run for decades with minimal intervention. And besides that the reason why lithium ion cells degrade over time is that their parts literally wear out, but you have to scrap and recycle them because it's impossible to open up a cell and service it. The fact that repairing one of these is even possible makes up for a lot of the shortcomings.
19:00 YES!! I have been following flow battery technology for a couple years. I think this is an exceptional opportunity. I hope that it could make it's way to home storage though. Just another appliance, but with monitoring and dispatch of a technician. You get you A/C serviced every few years, right? Add some monitoring equipment to dispatch a technician and repairs get billed over 12 months so even a surprise issue doesn't hurt so bad.
I think that this could be used in areas where power outages are common, especially in the shipping container form factor. I can imagine them being disturbed based upon capacity to various neighborhoods. It could also be able to help increase the effectiveness of grid tie residential solar, by giving a place for excess solar storage closer to the site of production decreases the line loses from the power having to travel to a larger facility.
I love this technology, I cant wait to have this available to the projects I work on. I am however a little concerned about their janky hardware-store bought PVC piping for hydrogen lines. Hopefully they will put in proper piping in their production versions, as I am afraid this will be an explosion hazard from hydrogen gas leaks.
@@kinzieconrad105 How can you tell? They don't even have to be profitable with all the green subsidies it is going to get. Governments are dishing out big bucks on stuff like this. The carbon credit market is entirely artificial but it is there and just getting started. There is money to be made there. Does it matter if its made by a viable business or a political gimmick, from an investor's standpoint? Money is money.
Very exciting technology. Perfect for dealing with varying yield from solar and wind. And on the moving parts issue a Tesla Powerwall has liquid cooling with pumps, radiator, and hoses that occasionally need maintenance.
I think this is great. What irks me is the local utilities are adding 150 MW of solar farms with no nighttime battery backup in the same grid as one of many new 150MW enterprise data centers which are claiming to be sustainable 100% green data centers. These data centers also have 150meg of standby diesel generators running 30 minutes per month producing NOx and CO2 and are given special lower-cost utility rates because they are green. In the same area, 10,000 new homes are being built to support two chip manufacturing plants that produce just under 90tons/year of NOx each and the utilities are discouraging solar panels for homeowners. So far all I see is marketing and not truly adding sustainable power.
Are the generators on for maintenance/testing purposes or because the datacenter isn't receiving enough power? Because as an IT admin I've recently heard about a diesel backup generator literally blowing up during a power outage because it wasn't maintained properly. Emergency power is a must-have for a datacenter. Systems can and do get fucked by unexpected shutdowns and unlike your personal desktop, you can't just reinstall it in a couple hours if they do.
@@Steamrick To maintain reliability a data center will test once a month. Typically this is at 80% load using load banks so as to reach the MFGs recommend running temperatures. To have a genset explode is very rare. With one genset mfg they had a design flaw which blew an engine rod. This does not affect it's subbase fuel tank and should not catch fire. Igniting a diesel tank on a genset does not happen. If the engine is properly maintained it should work for over 30 years. I agree having a backup for data centers is a must but claiming 100% sustainable is marketing. If they added EPA Tier 4 standby gensets using Renewable fuel then I would say they are no longer marketing and really trying to be green.
@@Steamrick Not being able to reinstall in a couple of hours is a budget and design issue. Not saying it's easy to design a system that can be quickly reinstalled -- you have to have management that's willing to invest in the months of work to do it right and a smart enough team to design and execute.
@@frontiervirtcharter Or instead of sinking uncountable resources into creating and testing automated reinstall, you could spend a fraction of that on good backups and safety features... Reinstalling is always a desparation move
That have to be a very large farm. The design comes with low density and low max amp delivered. The installed size have too be significant to deliver the amp needed by heavy machinery. It will be a lot easier to build a compact battery based on Li chemistry. You can easily configure a Li battery to deliver both high voltage and high amp. I think if it is used in a significant amount it will be on power plant scale where you run it like a chemical factory and store GWatt/hours.
I just bought a robot vacuum for $100 dollars. 10% of what the one you're pushing costs. Mine also laser maps the house and is very efficient and quiet. I have to empty my bin every time but I also have a much smaller charging station so I'm happy with it
i AGREE this will really work for grid scale storage. Self monitoring of the service items and reporting to maintenance office would solve the equipment wear problem.
Moving parts: lots of things in the home have moving parts. Fridges, heat pumps, robotic vacuum cleaners... I suspect with more iterations a flow battery can reduce the number of parts and their size.
I suspect they are already using the same off-the-shelf parts anyway. What's different to a pump that pumps salt water and a pump that pumps rusty salt water?
Part count can be offset if you increase the size of the system. Huge tanks, huge pumps. In relation to the capacity of the system you can have reasonable part counts. Imagine having a big power plant vs a ton of smaller generators. But having multiple container sized systems also has its benefit. Yeah sure part count is high, but you gain redundancy. Instead of losing the whole system in case of failure, you just lose a unit.
Every time you cover a grid scale energy storage technology you need to ask, point blank, what’s the round trip energy efficiency. 50 60 70 95%?? That’s one of the most important things to know about this since it has such a huge bearing on the economics of such a solution. An inexpensive design or inexpensive sustaining cost is great but it’s only half the story. Were they unwilling to answer? That would be a huge red flag.
I don't know about this one but the ZnBr plating battery from Redflow is said to be as efficient as pumped storage (around 80%). Not only can it be charged to 100% and discharged to zero, it must be discharged to 0 every three days or so to clean off the plates of Zn completely.
Looking at the cost trend of solar panels combined with increasing panel efficiency I think utilities will just oversize the arrays to make up the difference. Besides solar production now is absurdly high May through September, and low in December and January, I think the annual swing will be more to difficult to solve then day and night load balancing during summer months. To your point, the overall efficiency would matter most during the short cloudy days of winter.
since they are a water-salt-iron battery it is probably SUPER SUPER low. Since it's grid scale it doesn't matter, build 3 million gallons of tank capacity. Salt batteries have worse power density and iron have bad power to weight. You are likely stuck with the downsides of both to make it work.
@@13thbiosphere You get the cheap cost of bulk materials (sodium and iron) and the manufacturing costs are far less per kwh. Sodium ion batteries are only 30-40% cheaper than lithium because most of the cost is complexity and specialty of materials.
Their is a way that we should already be using everywhere. Perpetual motion to continually make clean energy for everything. Then reroute all extra energy to the power grid. Soooo much energy for everything.😎👍
@@johnramirez5032 Salt in solution can freeze and boil. But solute salt circulating and undergoing ionic charge and discharge? I'm not so sure how it would be affected by cold or head. Good observation though!!
I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible for a home installation. We have air conditioners and heaters and water heaters and all kinds of other things that have moving parts and require maintainance. Why not our electricity storage as well?
Since it seems unlikely consumer size units would be offered, for insurance and liability if nothing else. The homeowner would need to buy one of the standard semi trailer size modules and park it in the side yard. If that fits thier needs and county zoning allows, then sure why not? The modules will run themselves, and the app on your tablet will give real time status, and alarms when maintenance is needed.
@@docwatson1134 I bet they could get it to fit reasonably well in a basement and they seem safe enough. That's kind of what I would have in mind. I could easily see living in a home where my roof is mostly solar and my basement has a big liquid battery.
There will be a small shed sized residential battery I'm sure...just have to compartmentalize the moving parts into one unit that can be switched out with a spare. Send the broken one in for replacement and the depot fixes it and returns it to service.
First : I'd like to mention that you are the first I know to report this tech, and this is really great. I like to hear about this kind of stuff, so, good job. Now, as you are meeting people in these fields, like others, I'd like some numbers. When talking about grid scale storage, energy density is not a factor as you said, but there is lots of other factors. First : Density is still something to take account. If that's like, 1/100 of li-ion density, this may be a problem when you need like 1km² for 1MW. There is some minimums. So the number is still a bit relevant. What about peek power ? Is it ok for grid scale ? What about capacity ? Do they produce modular things to scale it up ? Last : I'd really, really you to ask one clear question : what is the current problem. You have things to take into account : -Tech : is everything ready or some R&D is still needed ? If needed, on what points ? -Cost : Is it cost effective ? Yeah, it have lots of cycles, great point, but still, you know what is the front cost for 1MW versus Li-ion ? And what is the life-cycle duration ? What are maintenance costs ? How costly is it to replace every moving part ? -Market : If the two first points are okay and good, maybe the market is not really ready yet, or no one want to be the first tester, this is sad, but if that's the case you should mention it because of your audience : you could make marketing to people knowing people who might be interested and promote this. -Funds : If everything is ready, maybe the problem is that the company lacks a bit of funds to scale up and peek inertia sending and everything. For example, the company may not be big enought to get the economies of scales leading to profit needed to improves and scale up the company (I think that's currently the problem with SMR, mixed with market acceptancy, though it's only my opinion). -Dates : when was the tech ready ? If that's last year, maybe if everything is right, that may take some times to hit the market. The 3 first points are crucial for every new tech related stuff. If you are talking about something new, I really want to hear WHY this is not everywhere. For example, the aluminium-air "battery" has some SERIOUS problems with no charge possible. It's still interesting to know the tech, but anything has drawbacks (almost) and if someone tells you there is no drawbacks, then they are hidding something. And this may be huge, blocking and the tech may lead nowhere. Thus it is not a company for selling a product, but a lab center for developping things, making R&D and taking funds to do that. R&D, Labs are not at all a problem even when working on seemingly not-working techs, because you never know what you're gonna find. But when you mix this with lying and dissimulation, it quickly leads to a scam.
Numbers are essential to estimate if this is ever going to scale up. How does one charge-discharge cycle look like? How does a thousand cycles? This is little better than an infomercial without data.
The other riders made fun of Leonardo, he couldn't control his horse. He realized a single bit in the animal's mouth was insufficient and added another. His friends started calling him "Two Bit daVinci".
This seems very promising and well thought out. Right up there with liquid air energy storage in terms of materials, scalability, durability, and cost. I will be rooting for them. Let’s see what happens.
I heard about redux flow batteries 3 years ago. So is nothing new for me. They initially proposed to be used in cars. But, this adds a lot of weight. But for grid storage / on-demand power supply are excellent. Created a battery with materials that are abundant on earth crust - priceless!
Thank you for interviewing the people who are making this tech. Great episode. I hope this tech works out with the plentiful resources this tech uses. Is there a safety issue with the hydrogen that's a byproduct?
@@AndrewThoesen I understand that. However, hydrogen is small and leaks through almost anything containing it. Is it in a form that is combustible if it leaks out?
@@Architeuthis87 Hydrogen is stored and transported in industry to make ammonia for fertilizer. They use mild, low carbon steel without any problems of embrittlement or leakage. This seems to be a scare tactic from Big Oil to put fear, uncertainty and doubt into people's minds. Nonsense!
On a large scale, pumped hydro makes much more sense. With batteries we pay by the watt-hour but with pumped storage (or the less efficient but much more versatile hydrogen) we pay by the watt with a very small premium for additional capacity. Batteries have nightmarish problems as large scale storage as well, mostly environmental costs. I retired from a Fortune 100 electric company 3 years ago, after we had our first lithium battery fire but before we had the one that severely injured four firemen. I took that one hard - after the first it was clear they are practically designed to kill firemen. The problem is inherent in any high capacity storage battery, but is not serious until we try to store more energy than the battery can absorb as heat if everything goes wrong.
We also need energy storage facilities in multiple places around America. So all that extra energy has somewhere to be stored until needed for other things.
Not to be a party pooper but Green Hydrogen can't even compete with gasoline. Operating an EV is much cheaper than gasoline which is much cheaper than hydrogen(Green Hydrogen is the most expensive hydrogen).
@@wineberryred Current energy prices you are correct, however As Intermittent renewables like wind and solar Become a bigger and bigger chunk of the grid the amount of surplus energy available on normal days if on normal days is going to push the price of electricity down. If that happens green hydrogen becomes much cheaper Is, moreover hydrogen electrolysis at scale isn't really being done at the moment so I suspect that mass scale production Will push these prices down further. Do I think that hydrogen will be used for Ground transport or energy storage? No if bridge? No however I think it will have a place in aviation particularly if The modernized Zeppelin's Become a thing.
@@mrspeigle1 round trip effeciency of hydrogen is too low to be economically viable. When energy us cheap because of oversupply you are better off chargin EVs than making hydrogen.
There are a few great and promising Hydrogen technologies and they will have a place, but they are not solutions for the same problems. Right now, there are very few real "green" hydrogen production techniques and they lack the efficiencies for grid storage.
@@mrspeigle1 Ammonia can be used for energy transport through pipelines made of carbon steel that aren't treated to provide transportation of hydrogen.
The first thought about where to store it that came to me was under road infrastructure (placed on top of the geothermal system, of course!) Our roads cover an *INCREDIBLE* amount of space that can't be used for anything else and vehicles have *VERY* low ground pressure when compared to buildings/etc., so burying things that take up a lot of space (like flow batteries and geothermal grids) seems like a perfect match to me.
@@acmefixer1 While the energy might be available 24/7/365, *enough* energy might not be at a particular time. By storing energy when demand is low, it can be released when demand is higher than production can sustain.
I saw a flow battery that they were developing for residential use. It was a zinc-bromide battery, and they offeres maintenance services, the same way any appliance works.
I suppose the question is how fast can you charge / discharge? Can they help with grid stabilisation? The Tesla big battery in Australia is capable of ramping from 0 to 100MW in 140 milliseconds. I can see an eventual tiered hybrid system, with ultra super capacitors able to supply high levels of current for brief times, but with nearly infinite cycle life, then LiON or LFP to provide a longer 4-8 hours, with flow batteries and other tech supplying storage measure in days. With the ever falling price of solar, it's cheaper to double of triple the installed base of production than it is to have weeks of battery storage. Industries will crop up that can use the excess energy, which in sunnier climates is likely for the majority of the year.
You said: " ... it's cheaper to double of triple the installed base of production than it is to have weeks of battery storage. " Yeah, but the sun is only up roughly half of the day on a yearly average. Some industries can shut down at night but many or most need to operate 24/7 and I don't just go to sleep when the sun goes down, do you? Renewable energy needs an energy buffer regardless of the type (solar/wind). And who said anything about "weeks of storage", a week is likely enough for most places.
It would be interesting to see how cost effective this is in real terms and how does it handle heat or cold, would it adapt to Arizona or Alaska. How is the system effected by temperature. How would electric rates differ from what we have now to using a system like this. I like the idea, it seems very good but I have seen many good ideas over the years that never come to be. Could it be scaled down to off grid home/cabin use or is it just to expensive to do so. Can the system be refurbish at the end of its life cycle or will it simply be added to the trash pile like millions of batteries end up now. Could something like this be added to nuclear power plants that don't throttle up and down well to smooth out the energy needs as energy consumption rises and falls thru the business day. How many of these trailers would it take to store the energy of a city with say 100K people. Would it make more sense to have one giant power storage centrally located with a system like this or would several smaller substations be more efficient. Lastly how much potential is there yet to be gained from more energy efficient homes and businesses that can help reduce the need for massive power plants and help make systems like this more feasible.
@Douglas W If you had listened to what he said, you would have heard him say that it is not something that would be used for a home residence or small scale. You're trying to spread propaganda about lithium batteries filling up landfills and that's pure nonsense. They're far too valuable to spread on landfills; a used EV battery could be sold for more than $10,000. The valuable chemicals are recycled. And many countries have laws requiring recycling batteries.
@@acmefixer1 you must not have very good reading comprehension or have misunderstood my comments. I am not trying in any way to spread propaganda I am simply asking how much can be recycled and how viable the system is. I have seen many great ideas come and go in my lifetime never to make it to the market place or fall short of the promised intensions. I actually have high hopes for many of these systems as man kind can not continue consuming and wasting like we have for the last 100 years. Systems that may work well in one part of the country hot/cold may now work as well in other areas. In the future we may need different solutions for different climates and regions of the country. A great example is nuclear power is great until it isn't, decommissioning a power plant can be astronomically expensive and what do you do with all the waste. The cheap energy that you get in the beginning isn't so cheap in the end at cleanup time.
Great topic and video! Thanks. I need to understand the electrochemistry, because from your description, it’s not clear that this really is a true flow battery. That, since you described electroplating onto one of the electrodes, which means that the reactions are not entirely within the reactants pumped through it. Bigger picture though: - A rechargeable battery contains all of its reactants, and its reaction can be reversed. - A one-time-use battery is the same except its reactions that produces electricity are not reversible. - Electoplating is the opposite: What is essentially a battery-charging process is not reversible. The ion flow through the electrolyte leaving you with a crust of metal on the electrode. - A fuel cell is a battery containing only the electrical components, and the chemicals flow through it, but those reactions are not reversible. - A flow battery is like a fuel cell, but where the reactions are reversible. This seems to be something else in that the electrode materials are involved in at least on of the electrode reactions.
Sounds like a very good solution to power grid style storage ! Not sure the cost comparisons to other storage types for the long run as a maintenance program would be part of this system but eventually everything requires some sort of maintenance...
Apparently theoretical energy density is 170 Wh/kg. It is comparable with older types of Li-Ion batteries, but the volumetric density is lower, probably 120-150 Wh/L. Plus add the mass and volume of all the infrastructure. Also boosting 1,21V to 320V or more is not a great idea - efficiency drops with rise of voltage difference...
I think you have reason to be exited. From the flow systems i have seen, this on seem really tight and together, as we say in the music biz. I believe it would be good for farms, as farmers are used to handling maschinery, and chemicals. I would buy shares in that company. 🇩🇰🙋🏻♂️🌞👩🏻🚀🇺🇸
Their single container 33kW system seems perfect for large farms, where you maybe want to use solar to be independent of grid issues (and might have a bit of distance to the grid, leading to instability), but need stability. My electricity comes from far away, and even just a little bit of wind in a pretty large region between me and the nearest power station leads to me sitting in the dark. I have seriously considered solar + battery, because home office without power sucks dead rats through garden hoses (to quote Jeri Ellisworth)
I don't understand the technology but I appreciate the call for more localized infrastructure rather than grid dependence upon miles of pylons supporting many more miles of high voltage cabling. Localized energy generation with corresponding local bulk storage batteries, all serviced/maintained locally sounds very appealing.
What's the round trim efficiency? What's the capital cost per GWh of storage.. Rarely get this, the most important of information of all. Until we have this info, the rest is.. whatever...
This looks like promising solution for southern countries.... However northern countries have winters with minus degees (in Celsius) and the main component of the battery is water...
Interesting video, and thanks, but... You don't inspire confidence when you mix up amps (current) with amp-hours (amount of charge) and also get it wrong by a factor of 1,000. You said "fifty-two hundred amp battery" when you meant "five point two amp-hours" or "fifty-two hundred milliamp-hours". Even then, Watt-hours would be more useful because it would tell us how much work the thing can do before it goes flat :-)
You are missing a few things. Flow batteries cant do what big installations of lithium batteries like the Tesla Hornsdale installation in South Australia do. The difference is lithium can discharge super quickly which means they are the best solution for frequency control on the grid. Because you can make alot of money in the frequency control space this has been implemented first and they are still learning what these installations are capable of. But you dont need alot of frequency control compared to baseload storage. Flow batteries are best suited as long term energy storage that can be used as a replacement for baseload, you just have to install enough of them, and that is alot. It would most definitely be a waste to use lithium for baseload storage when flow batteries can do the job. There are some flow batteries usable in the home like a powerwall. The Redflow Zinc bromine flow battery for example is smaller than the examples in your video and can be used at residential level , in cellphone towers as backup systems, or scaled up to grid level or any size in between.
Thank you for great video! My favourite grid-storage battery, so far. I especially like the fact that the waste produced is nothing more than salt, iron and water. The stumbling blocks, I don't think are really problematic, just not seen from the right perspective. One thing we had to learn a looooooong time ago, is that humans are the only creators of waste. There's no waste in nature, just another component on the giant cyclical production line of the cosmos. We just want to control energy and information for profit, like so many things. And the same greed is and will stop us from reaching the 2030 and 2050 goals. We have not learned from the history of non-cooperation between Tesla and Edison and many more, "intelligent" men, besides. Today we have all these companies, again competing and not sharing and this time it's not just about copper mines. But all will be as it will be. It is written. GG! PTL & BLESSINGS
There is a _lot_ of waste in nature, and it will eventually doom large organisms. Since the dawn of multicellular plants and animals life have ingested carbon and taken it to the grave. Estimates vary, but we have somewhere between about 17% and 6% of our original surface carbon left. Vast amounts will never be free; marine organisms have converted it to calcium carbonate. We now have large limestone deposits, but those are estimated to be less than 5% of what is at the bottom of the oceans. Now shortsighted humans are trying to bury carbon even faster so it will not be available... ever.
I've recently been watching some of your videos and find yours extremely informative and well done. I thinking also of your 3M video I saw recently. I have been pondering for some time now why aren't lead acid batteries split and separated into separate components, like pumping and storing electrolytes into external tanks and thus storing larger amounts of electrical energy. I now see this is "in general" what Flow Batteries are all about. So good news!. I must say theatrically YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY A ⭐⭐⭐ 5 STAR ⭐⭐ 0:21 presenter and salesman - Paul
The thing is to get the LCOE cost down below lifepo4. The mining / raw materials crunch is going to be real so something that is low cost, lasts a long time, hence material needs is low, is safe, pretty non-toxic and cheap/easy to recycle is going to be interesting.
Tesla is moving to LFP batteries in stationary storage in place of variations of the LNMC batteries that are used in cars. The 20,000 cycle life applications, it is critical that they have daily charge cycles. This type of battery is perfect for storing wind and solar electricity. Lets keep LFP and LMNC batteries for use in cars, trucks and similar applications. For the next 10+ years we will not be able to make adequate quantity of batteries for mobile applications.
Interesting story. That first guy didn't know that a lithium cell is between about 3 and 4 volts - he suggested it would be half a volt. Doesn't inspire confidence. From what he said it's not the avoidance of series stacking that gives their solution voltage stability, it's the choice of using a dc-dc converter. Which is probably exactly what the lithium cell systems do too, they just do it with a series battery at a higher voltage. Their extra low voltage system must have crazy high current, which itself brings challenges and isn't necessarily going to be the most efficient from the pov of the electronics. Now, the fact of continuously circulating your electrolyte for fresh presumably also helps with voltage stability - but he didn't say that.
The biggest problem with this version of a flow battery is the fact that it's two components that need to be added to increase CAPACITY (kilowatt-hours), electrolyte storage and plating area. Other flow batteries ONLY need to increase the amount of electrolyte. If POWER (kilowatts) needs to be increased, then the number or size of the plates need to be increased. So if one starts at 5 kwh @ 1kw draw but then needs to upgrade to 10 kwh @ 1kw, one only has to add more electrolyte to double the capacity. Using the Iron Flow battery, one would need to increase both electrolye AND plate number/size, a much more costly upgrade. On the other hand, if one wants to increase POWER (kilowatts) say from 1 kw to 2kw, only the number/size of the plates need be doubled. So a proper design would be to design the system with enough power at the start and the minimal capacity then add more capacity over time as need changes or as finances allow.
So it absolutely makes sense what you're saying because there are things that are not stationary and for those things you would need more densely energy like lithium iron or lithium phosphite but for grid I mean you don't even need a flow battery you could also use capacitors you could have a capacitor that's the size of a skyscraper that would be relatively cheap to build and the advantage of that is that it will charge very quickly and if you have enough of those even though it takes up more space hypothetically a power grid doesn't really need to be densely packed it could use a little more space and be more sustainable
I guess the proton pump is more efficient than electrolysing out oxygen gas and adding extra water, but it will be more complicated. Considering some people are seriously considering thermal energy storage, I wonder how much efficiency really matters? Such a system, if simplified, would be actually rather easy for a hobbyist to build too. Hope this succeeds, definitely looks like the most promising solution to grid storage I’ve seen, so long as the other electrode material isn’t too exotic. Also it’s more of a hybrid flow battery, like a hybrid rocket motor.
We need to greatly invest in this. Use it for specific purposes, only think about large scale, don't worry about small uses leave that for lithium ion. It's cool it was in Oregon. I live in Oregon. 👍
I love how people just assume putting something like this "outside of the City, where there's lots room" is ok with the people who live in those places. If your don't want it in your back yard why do you think I want it in mine?
You were very quick on the weather, how is it changing ?the past predictions have not been right .the sea ,level is stable,now continue pushing the narrative!!!!!!!
I think the niche available to flow batteries is quite small. Items: A) They all suffer from cross contamination between anolyte and catholyte. Expensive to deal with, only vanadium type fully avoids it, most expensive type. B) Advantage is for high kwhr storage per kw rating, but that market is lower priced $/kwhr than the fast short-time market that Lion works in. Iron flow depends on plating iron onto cathode, eliminates advantage of flow batteries of adding kwhr by adding tanks of reactants. C) If this system were viable, it would own the Megapack market Tesla sells to. There's a deal breaker in there somewhere. The vanadium flow has been commercial scale since 20+ years.
This could also be applied to local, subdivision level storage - use it during peak demand or grid outages so it is exercised and helps reduce the peak generation needs of the grid...
I agree, I'm excited for this tech. I see it very suited for large solar or wind farms out in large open areas, such as unused semi-arid or arid land across the south of the US. Because of the lack of storage density though it would be harder to incorporate in dense infrastructure, so close to cities or even farmland. We'll have plenty of data about it though since they're already deployed and obviously deploying more.
The Tesla Powerwall (and similar products) do have some moving parts: They tend to have some fans for cooling purposes. The transformer in particular can get hot during operation. That said, good fans admittedly do have a very low probablilty of failure even over years and years of operation.
Thanks to Roborock & You For your Support! Get the S7+! cli.fm/Roborock-S7Dock-TwobitdaVinci-YT-Amazon
Your battery capacity is wrong. The battery can't be 5200 Ah. It is in mAh. Fix the commercial before more people notice.
FLOW batteries are experiential, and FLOW batteries difficult to scale.
Tesla MEGAPACK is already profitable, and Tesla will reduce costs with LFP cells.
FLOW batteries is FAKE NEWS.
DaVinci is a Cereal Box Engineer.
gives REAL Engineer ELON a bad name.
Wait wait wait. 5200ah battery?!? Is that thing a super hero battery bank?!?!?
funfact, germany tries to put lignin in these batteries....a waste product in wood production. In Germany we used the same product for plastic products. So we are able to make a battery with wood-based plastic containers and parts and with a wood-based waste product to store energy in them.....
and now the game breaker....we could potential do this underground in former massive gas caves too. :D the technology is not fully there, but in lets say 10-20 years we could solve thereby the energy storing problem for solar and wind-energy.....we just need to plant some more trees....and we have to plant more trees to counter the heating of climatic change.
oh and these batteries are easily recycled, this is the actual problem to create these batteries without having these batteries to be exchanged after like 5 years. And they get more efficient every year. So maybe we want to exchange them every 5 years to get the improved versions.
I’m an old mechanical engineer and have been into this stuff for 30 years….This seems like the best option I’ve seen so far - it will be low cost, will last for a very lomg time, will not mess up the environment and will provide power over a long duration - time to invest!!!
Do your homework before sinking any money into flow batteries. I worked on an Imergy (now bankrupt) vanadium redox battery a few years back. Energy efficiency was an awful 60% due to the pumps and fans. Efficiency only gets worse if you're not cycling it daily. I know they sold a lot of them in India because of their unreliable grid. There are few viable use cases IMO.
The best option so far is nuclear but the party of science is preventing its use even though climate change is supposed to be a world ending disaster.
@@mattmills7867 Thanks for the advice, hopefully the efficiency of things on the mechanical end will improve!
@@lkytmryan I'm concerned that Nuclear will end up making a small handful of people rich, they will control the power, who gets it, who doesn't and what does it cost. Solar/Wind have a much better chance for a power to belong to everyone. That being said, I think we will end up with a baseline of Nuclear. I think it would be smart to have a baseline supply of nuclear in the 25% range. There has been a lot of work to make nuclear safer, more modular and more affordable. With just normal innovation/improvement on the combination of wind, solar and storage it will increasingly difficult for nuclear to compete from a straight economics standpoint. With Elon's mega-packs they can't compete now.
@@lkytmryan I don't think "party" has anything to do with the general failures of the human intellect that include confirmation bias. Yes, the left may tend to have more "anti-nuclear", but the right has the "anti-vaccine". These are just two examples of a single aspect of a much larger group of logical failures. Tribalism, Dunning-Krueger... the list is long and exhausting. I personally agree that from a purely statistical and scientific aspect, Nuclear should be a part of the solution.
You've done a really good job walking us through the engineering and business tradeoffs, which is a breath of fresh air not just on UA-cam, but in technology reporting generally. Thank you for this work!
🙏
@@TwoBitDaVinci Some real numbers would have been nice. For now this is just a pay in sky type of technology. For example:
- How many ton of raw material is needed to store a GW/hour?
- What is the largest installation they have done.
- How long have they run at what cost. Not projected cost, but some real numbers
- How has the cost scaled from the start until the latest installations.
- What factor they expect for maintenance cost compared to installation cost.
@@bknesheim Here:
???????????
- I recently stocked up on them. Take those. Don't worry about returning them. I have plenty, and they're free where I'm from.
I have been following this technology from the beginning. It's the only battery worth using for grid storage. 40 years from now I think you will see them being used in homes too.
It looks very promising for grid-scale storage. I like the concept, particularly the design flexibility. One could imagine having a large plant-like installation where the proton pump and electrolyte massaging is done on a larger scale, I don't see any particular advantage in the shipping container model where each container must replicate the mechanical bits. At least not for something like this. It makes sense for a lithium cell, but any time you have mechanical components you have to think about economies of scale.
-Matt
Why not use 1 trailer for the mechanicals and daisychain the liquid cell containing trailers together.
They have two basic set ups. Their original solution was in a small 20' con-ex that grew to a 40' container that was stackable up to 2 or 3 units high. They still offer the container units, but their focus is buildouts indoors with the electrolyte solution stored outside in tanks.
There are still applications for the con-ex solution, especially for temp solutions or dispatchable solutions in an area that has lost transmission, such as after a hurricane or other natural disaster. They may also be preferable to a facility that doesn't have indoor capacity but a large lot.
@@ScottLaneSabineParish that is kinda cool.
The shipping container model gives you modularity.. Need to expand? Truck in a container, or five or ten .
Pumps starting to wear out? Replace one container at a time without shutting down your entire storage.
And the other advantage of modularity .. economy of production scale. Instead of a custom-sized build for each customer depending on how big they are, you can build and/or order batches of identical parts and crank these things out assembly-line style.
@@briandbeaudin9166 Integrated modules prevent single point-of-failure risks.
How about numbers to compare with other battery farms: size, weight, maintenance cost, etc.
What percentage of output powers the kidney pumps?
Are the reusing shipping containers?
Can one large tank replace many small tanks?
Temperature impacts?
GREAT TOPIC!
Yeah he didn't even talk about efficiency when that's the most important point, just a promotional video for the business I guess.
@@harshbatheja actually its more about installation cost and maintenance whether it competes with traditional packs.
@@harshbatheja I assume that you are referring to RT or "round trip" efficiencies? That is the aspect with ESS and other flow cell technologies that most influence the LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) They are not as efficient as Lithium Ion forms and that is one aspect that influences the need to increase size to offset the value. It is also an aspect of energy density. Generally, they tend to be in the 70% to 75% range which is less than other common types of storage but as the value does not decrease with each cycle, there is a large cost savings over the duration of the project.
The real gain in value is that while the size of the connection, say 1MW will require a bit more space than the same value of Lithium Ion, the gain in time (MWhrs) is far, far better than Lithium Ion for example, Lithium Ion is generally set on a 2hr value (1MW over 2 hrs is equal to 2MWhrs). For the Lithium model, to go to 4 hrs would require doubling the number of batteries and thus size, the ESS system is just more electrolyte in the existing package. This goes up to about 12 hrs per package for ESS. Imagine the number of Lithium Ion batteries required for a 12 hr discharge capability?
Another benefit of ESS is that you can completely discharge the battery (last 10% with a voltage drop) without damaging the cells. Just recharge and off you go.
Sorry, I am excited for these guys. A GW or 2 of storage, strategically placed in the ERCOT market, could have solved so many of the problems from last year.
This is the only things I wanted to know
@@ScottLaneSabineParish Well, here in the UK, everyone is raving about 'green hydrogen' and how we can use our renewables to make it for use in fuel cell vehicles as well as to replace our serious dependance on natural gas and kerosene for hot water and space heating (which accounts for about 70% of the UKs total energy use). So, even at 75% RT efficiency, it is 2.5 times better than green H2's 30% (at best). The infrastructure cost of flow batteries would also be a fraction of H2's...
I've been following Redflow batteries in Australia fer at least 12 years waiting for them to become viable. So many benefits at the cost of a little extra space.
So do I. We should make a fair comparison.
I have seen YT video's on Redflow a while ago. Are they really taking off now ?
I have been watching many videos about solar panels, and climate change and I've been worried about the storage problem for solar, watching this new solution being developed feels great!!!!
From an ecological standpoint, hydrogen distribution and storage make far more sense. Eliminate high voltage transmission entirely, eliminate battery chemicals altogether, safe storage.
@@flagmichael Hydrogen-handling and transporting is worse then electricityhandling and transport
I recently passed by a wind generator farm with several hundred wind mills that stretched over twenty miles along the highway. I think that is the type of system that would benefit from this new technology. Thank you for sharing this with us.
I remember the first time I saw a wind farm along a freeway back in 2002. I was told that it, and many other wind farms in California were completely un-used because they weren't able to connect them. I now know that what they were missing then is still missing now, energy storage on a scale that will actually work with wind.
@@darkestaxe3415 In Europe at that time we had also problems to conect offshore windfarms because the huge DC-Transformer for multible KilovoltTransmission didnt work flawless yet. These days that shouldnt be the problem anymore.
But yess Storage is the key for renewables.
At first I recoiled *hard* when you said these weren't feasible for home use...
But then I started thinking about municipal grids, with every small town, or ward of a city has its own grid powered by its own energy sources and stored in its own local iron flow battery bank, and that could be cool. Bringing the grid down to community levels
I just love how things are changing. How sustainable, easily procurable and environment friendly a new technology is, is one of the main questions in the interview.
Neat video- Powerwalls do have moving parts, coolant pump and fans (I believe you said “…no moving parts”) it’s definitely important that residential systems have little to no maintenance, Tesla plus most other modern residential systems are effectively maintenance free, there are differences of course.
I like everything about this battery technology except how many moving parts it has. The battery's chemistry may last a long time but what is the expected failure rate of the least durable unit in that mechanical system?
Same. I saw tubes marked 'hydrogen' during the video when they showed the 'kidneys'. That usually doesn't bode well for long term stability of anything that comes into contact with (embrittlement)
All power generating facilities have tons of moving parts, because they all generate electricity by spinning up turbines using flow of steam, water, or air. The exception is solar panels, and that's only when assuming you don't rotate the array towards the sun (which is arguably much less prone to errors than spinning up a reactor to 50 rotations per second).
So, I'd say this new complexity is literally just replacing the old complexity and the net is at 0, especially if used in conjunction with solar panels. As compared to other batteries... well, it'd be nice if we discovered an even better way, but alas, lithium is gonna get damn expensive if we use it at this scale.
@@btCharlie_ That seems like apples to oranges comparison to me. We aren't talking about the generation of the power. We are talking about a buffering system to allow a steady stream of energy from an unsteady source and that component is addressed more simply with other forms of battery storage that don't have many if any moving parts.
I still want to know the expected failure rate of the least durable unit in that mechanical system and/or the fail rate of each of the components i.e. how much labor and replacement cost is expected vs battery systems without so many moving parts?
@@davidmcelvain1394 Sorry, I might've made my point more convoluted than it needed to be - sure, you could use a lithium-ion array combined with solar panels and you'd have nearly no moving parts at all, but moving parts in and of themselves aren't really that big a deal, because the current mass energy generation is done with many, many moving parts and it works just fine even with the maintenance costs. And more broadly speaking, I kind of doubt the maintenance costs would outweigh the price of more exotic materials once you'd start working with them at scale, though sure, that's just a guess.
I would definitely like to know the specs of the all the parts and how they compare to other batteries regardless of whether they may pose an issue or not. Lastly, if a technology pops up that is both cheap and straightforward, that'd be just great. Sadly, it hasn't done so yet.
@@peterzerfass4609
Huge amounts of hydrogen are stored and transported in industry to make ammonia for fertilizer. The industry uses mild (low carbon) steel without problems or "embrittlement" which is apparently something Big Oil has tried to use to scare people with F U D. This is nonsense.
The only concerns are, as he said, the pumps and equipment with moving parts.
One other thing that seems to be a concern is that not connecting batteries in series means that the 1.1 volts DC must have large copper conductors so it might take a lot of copper for the electronics.
It looks like they recently signed a contract with some big fish to deploy 2GWh of batteries by 2026. Let's hope they don't fuck this up.
All the ones prior have fucked it up. Hype propaganda can't produce results.
@@westtexas806 It's not like it even matters if they fuck it. We already have cheap reliable power, people just choose to hate it. It's hilarious how people create a problem then act like it's actually important to get their fabricated problem fixed.
@@bobbygetsbanned6049 Coal is not cheap, it comes with some heavy pollution which has a cost. Nuclear is not cheap, it comes with heavy regulations (which is good, otherwise it wouldn't be reliable). Wind, solar and hydro complement each other very well, but you need SOME base load, and a few installations like that will be enough once wind, solar and hydro are widespread enough. Hydro CAN be a long term base load, if dams are installed. But those are not cheap, and come with some disadvantages. For minimal dam size in rivers, hydro can still be a short term base load, but right now here in Norway it's a dry spell and we're paying through the nose for our cheap hydro power. Gas and oil are better than coal, but not by that much.Unfortunately we're also exporting power to other european countries due to existing trade agreements, so we're REALLY gonna see some high prices when it gets cold in two months time.
A good solution is probably to use pumped hydro where you can, batteries and solar+wind where you can't. And if you're Germany and decide to close down new power plants instead of the old ones, and also to phase out nuclear before coal, you can bugger off.
@@olegil2 Thorium Nuclear not Coal...
@@westtexas806 that's fine. energy storage companies are a dime a dozen.
I'm not sure I view this as a flow battery. It's capacity is limited by the amount of iron plated onto the anode. Once charged, the cell cannot charge more by swapping tanks. The similar is true for discharge, once the Fe is dissolved, one cannot swap a tank and continue to discharge. The cell itself determines capacity as well as power. Nothing is mentioned as to tradeoffs in capacity vs. power when designing the cell. I can't tell if there should be any or if the cell can be arbitrarily thick in order to permit plating of a large volume of iron.
So they need swappable annodes!
Yeah, they didn't mention peak power - one of the other highlights of lithium ion. The system needs to be capable of doing a full charge/discharge cycle in half a day at most or it's kind of useless for short-term storage.
Another significant problem with this type of battery is dendrite growth. As the battery charges and metal is plated onto the anode, it doesn't plate in a flat surface but can grow spikes. it is difficult to prevent these spikes eventually growing across the battery to the cathode and short circuiting the battery. I'm sure they have a way of dealing with it, but it's one of the secrets behind their system.
It should be referred to as a plating battery. There is another one using Zinc Bromide which comes from Redflow in Australia. Quite a different concept than a flow battery.
Why not? It seems quite possible to change tanks or have larger tanks.
Looks good. I'll be even more excited once they go to production, as so many times we hear about new battery technologies, and then they run into problems before they make it to market. Wishing these folks all the best.
Good presentation.
As far as domestic applications are concerned I would not be too quick to dismiss this potential use. Consider refrigeration and air-conditioning. When they were first invented they were huge noisy machines that required much maintenance and now every house virtually has at least one of each.
Maybe they can refine these flow batteries for smaller utilities and homes.
Good point. And let's not forget the possibilities of nanomachine technology. It may be, in some (far?) distant future, we have inexpensive, non-toxic, scalable power cells made up of hundreds, thousands, or millions of microscopic ion pump batteries with nanopumps moving a few molecules of an electrolyte across a few molecules of iron - producing tiny fractions of a volt each - but fully scalable (on micro and macro levels), and good for decades. "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Henry David Thoreau
I came across ESS a few years ago and was really excited, but nothing really seemed to happen with them. Still hoping they take off, it is really cool tech.
Great video!
Storage on a huge scale is, of course, the critical link in renewable energy - there’s more than enough energy available from the sun in solar panels and wind provided it can be kept until needed.
There are many chemistries that hold promise if the requirement for high energy density is not an issue: exciting times ahead.
yess
Have you examined the Ambri Battery that started in M.I.T?
I have been responding to utility scale RFP's with an ESS product option for about 7 years. They have almost always gone with a short duration, higher LCOE lithium Ion option. Why? Exposure to media and because everyone they know does it that way. It has been frustrating and I suck at sales. I have been an avid ESS convert since about 2015 and a big shout out to my friends with ESS. Also congrats on the $300M contract and time to expand again!
Both this video and the website fail to show any details of what makes the solution uniquely capable. It would seem well suited for long duration storage (perhaps even beyond the day /night cycle) but without public information and reference installs I can see why people would be skeptical. Lion is relatively proven. Solutions like this, green hydrogen, cryogenic air, aluminum air, sodium batteries and the ambri liquid metal battery are all great in theory but need hard numbers and strong reference clients to take off at economical scale. Market confidence will require basically gifting it to a startup client (requires capital) or two, more open marketing and a strong technical advantage. Details like round trip efficiency, cost, maintenance projections, modularity, power, energy, response speed and losses for long term storage are critical. Snake oil solutions have managed to secure contracts and failed misurably which obviously makes people nervous (ie stacking heavy concrete blocks then deconstructing it)
If you are interested, I can google some info for you. To be brutally honest, most of us are lazy and won't do our homework. For most of the projects that I have offered ESS as an LiIon alternative, the data, resources, access to data, etc., were available, but most corporations at a certain size, will develop a culture of "don't rock the boat" and don't do more than you have to. I know that many of the proposals were considered, but in the end, the engineering review's had to sell it to management and then possibly reissue the RFP for others to list as an option and it was just easier and quicker to use LiIon. That and I am just not a salesperson.
The worst thing to happen to a good idea is not that it be skillfully attacked but that it be ineptly defended. Fredric Bastiat
You didn't mention whether or not these batteries can be charged to 100% and discharged to zero without any damage. Presumably, they would be similar to the ZnBr plating batteries which can be fully charged and discharged. They are made by Redflow in Australia and come in 10kWh units that are suitable for homes, either singly or severally.
They have tanks of electrolyte so they can scale the tank size to make the battery run longer. It doesn't seem to need to be charged to 100% and discharged to zero.
That is a good point about Redflow ZnBr flow battery 100% discharge. Here another good point on the electrochemistry of why battery power goes down, i.e. the buildup of charge imbalance decreases overall charge imbalance between anode and cathode, and how flow batteries can use mitigating techniques to address the imbalance. I would be interesting to see if Redflow is also looking into any charge imbalance mitigation for ZnBr.
I am a huge fan of flow batteries and using such abundant materials is the path. You did a great job with tank size and pump size for power over time and power. I hope you will keep up with these folks. Thank you Ricky!
Red flow has been doing flow batteries in Australia 🇦🇺 for a while now.
This will be a gamechanger. No airconditioning needs, no hazmat license, no fire suppression, these all add up, and theyve said the life expectancy is 25-30 years, not that it loses capacity but they figured over that much time it's probably a good idea to replace the tanks. It's often not 'the best' tech that is mass adopted, but the most affordable and this has to check so many boxes for utility companies. I would love to see ESS develop a residential battery and would buy one fast based on the lack of fire, toxicity or explosions and a life expectancy so long it would actually add value to a home, unlike the Li-ion batteries I see
Great video, huge flow battery fan. A suggestion for a future video is charging highways for electric vehicles, it seems every time anyone talks electric, it comes down to charging times and range anxiety.
Seems like they could get more energy out of the iron by just oxiding it in a tank of salt water. If a kilogram of iron releases about 10 million Joules of energy when it is converted into Iron II Oxide, and a heat engine could capture the energy and convert it into electricity with 36% efficiency, the electrical energy would be about 1kilowatt hiour/kilogram. So a tank of salt water with oxygen bubbled into it that could rust iron dust at 1 kilogram per minute could power an 80 hp electric motor.
Since the iron oxide is so much heavier than the water, it would settle to the bottom of the tank. Or it could be separated with a magnet. If it was heated up in a crucible to a high enough temperature, the oxygen would be removed which is like recharging it. While it was melted, it could be turned back into dust by making a fine spray of it.
Iron ore costs about $100/ton. Gasoline costs about $1400 a ton and is not so easy to recycle. Concentrated solar used to heat up the rust dust in a crucible and remove the oxygen might use 90% of the heat which would be like using ten times as much electrical energy from 20% efficient solar panels if the electrical recharging process is only 50% efficient.
So one cubic meter iof ron would store about as much energy as two cubic meters of gasoline or ten cubic meters of hot water heated to near the boiling point.
Blood uses iron to transport oxygen. The iron dust would be a lot like blood cells.
Water expands when heated. A wine bottle filled with water into the neck will show about an inch of expansion into the neck when heated about 50°C. This could be harnessed by a hydraulic piston to drive a fluid turbine with tremendous force. It could be much smaller than a steam turbine and not require such high temperature operation. But the efficiency might be much higher than a steam turbine for converting heat to electricity because there is not the wasted energy from propelling a large volume of water to a high velocity, much of which cannot be recovered. A giant hydraulic piston forcing a small stream of water under zillions of tons of pressure through a water turbine could be built right into the tank if salt water and iron dust making the whole system lighter and smaller and less expensive.
If a big tank of water expanded a piston one meter with a thousand tons of force on it, it would generate about ten million Joules. If a wine bottle expands water about an inch up the neck for 50 °C, then a one cubic meter tank would expand the water through a wine bottle neck cylinder about 20 meters.
Those little music boxes have a big gear with a worm gear at the end of the drive train that Spins at zillions of rpm's if you put a big. force on the big cylinder with the pins sticking out that prick the little metal bars to make the music.
One kilogram of iron would heat up the cubic meter of water about 2°C which would push the piston about one meter. A thousand tons of force times one meter is about ten million Joules. But what mechanical gear system could with stand 1000 tons of force? If instead the water was forced through a small hole to drive a tiny turbine with a flow rate of 3000m/sec, the energy generated at 30%efficiency would be about 3 million Joules which is close to 1 kwh.
So if there was a big cylinder with a separation in the middle that house a turbine powered by a thin stream of high pressure water, the water could just be pushed back and forth through the turbine as one side iwas heated and the other cooled. Apparently it must be more efficient and easier to drive a steam turbine than a water turbine. Or maybe not. The low temperature operation would be an advantage and it might be much smaller, lighter, and less expensive. Maybe you can power an EV with it.
It depends on oxygen and temperature difference and there is an unlimited supply of air and air temperature cooling.
This was a good video, and I do like ESS' tech, but they are very much an outlier as far as flow batteries go. If you are going to do a video about flow batteries, the focus really should be on "standard" vanadium flow batteries, which have been installed for utility use. Good stuff.
Good feedback I’ll definitely cover others in the future
@@TwoBitDaVinci you are doing great and im rooting for you. Your technology is one of the cleanest in the world ive seen. The answers to the energy needs will come from different sources. At least for now. Keep going and know there is a need for your system. Where there is a will there is a way. Custoner support will be key to building your business
I think we're overestimating how much maintenance is going to have to actually be performed on a system like this. Industrial pumps are really reliable machines, they can run for decades with minimal intervention. And besides that the reason why lithium ion cells degrade over time is that their parts literally wear out, but you have to scrap and recycle them because it's impossible to open up a cell and service it. The fact that repairing one of these is even possible makes up for a lot of the shortcomings.
YESSS!!! The hunt for wisdom and understanding continues! Great work!
19:00 YES!! I have been following flow battery technology for a couple years. I think this is an exceptional opportunity. I hope that it could make it's way to home storage though. Just another appliance, but with monitoring and dispatch of a technician. You get you A/C serviced every few years, right? Add some monitoring equipment to dispatch a technician and repairs get billed over 12 months so even a surprise issue doesn't hurt so bad.
I think that this could be used in areas where power outages are common, especially in the shipping container form factor. I can imagine them being disturbed based upon capacity to various neighborhoods. It could also be able to help increase the effectiveness of grid tie residential solar, by giving a place for excess solar storage closer to the site of production decreases the line loses from the power having to travel to a larger facility.
I love this technology, I cant wait to have this available to the projects I work on. I am however a little concerned about their janky hardware-store bought PVC piping for hydrogen lines. Hopefully they will put in proper piping in their production versions, as I am afraid this will be an explosion hazard from hydrogen gas leaks.
Not to mention hydrogen accumulating in a slow leak. Then you have a 40 ft. fuel-air pipe bomb.
If this was an investor pitch, I would have said just take the money! Very well balance presentation and explanation.
And that why you are not an investor. They are clearly selling snake oil.
@@kinzieconrad105 How can you tell? They don't even have to be profitable with all the green subsidies it is going to get. Governments are dishing out big bucks on stuff like this. The carbon credit market is entirely artificial but it is there and just getting started. There is money to be made there. Does it matter if its made by a viable business or a political gimmick, from an investor's standpoint? Money is money.
Very exciting technology. Perfect for dealing with varying yield from solar and wind. And on the moving parts issue a Tesla Powerwall has liquid cooling with pumps, radiator, and hoses that occasionally need maintenance.
RedFlow have been doing this for a while in AUS. Interesting.
Redflow batteries are zinc bromine redox flow batteries, and they produce both grid scale and domestic units.
I think this is great. What irks me is the local utilities are adding 150 MW of solar farms with no nighttime battery backup in the same grid as one of many new 150MW enterprise data centers which are claiming to be sustainable 100% green data centers. These data centers also have 150meg of standby diesel generators running 30 minutes per month producing NOx and CO2 and are given special lower-cost utility rates because they are green. In the same area, 10,000 new homes are being built to support two chip manufacturing plants that produce just under 90tons/year of NOx each and the utilities are discouraging solar panels for homeowners. So far all I see is marketing and not truly adding sustainable power.
Are the generators on for maintenance/testing purposes or because the datacenter isn't receiving enough power?
Because as an IT admin I've recently heard about a diesel backup generator literally blowing up during a power outage because it wasn't maintained properly.
Emergency power is a must-have for a datacenter. Systems can and do get fucked by unexpected shutdowns and unlike your personal desktop, you can't just reinstall it in a couple hours if they do.
@@Steamrick To maintain reliability a data center will test once a month. Typically this is at 80% load using load banks so as to reach the MFGs recommend running temperatures. To have a genset explode is very rare. With one genset mfg they had a design flaw which blew an engine rod. This does not affect it's subbase fuel tank and should not catch fire. Igniting a diesel tank on a genset does not happen. If the engine is properly maintained it should work for over 30 years. I agree having a backup for data centers is a must but claiming 100% sustainable is marketing. If they added EPA Tier 4 standby gensets using Renewable fuel then I would say they are no longer marketing and really trying to be green.
@@Steamrick Not being able to reinstall in a couple of hours is a budget and design issue. Not saying it's easy to design a system that can be quickly reinstalled -- you have to have management that's willing to invest in the months of work to do it right and a smart enough team to design and execute.
@@frontiervirtcharter Or instead of sinking uncountable resources into creating and testing automated reinstall, you could spend a fraction of that on good backups and safety features...
Reinstalling is always a desparation move
I wonder if this would be a viable solution for agricultural operations - seems like farms could benefit from this type of power backup.
That have to be a very large farm. The design comes with low density and low max amp delivered.
The installed size have too be significant to deliver the amp needed by heavy machinery.
It will be a lot easier to build a compact battery based on Li chemistry. You can easily configure a Li battery to deliver both high voltage and high amp. I think if it is used in a significant amount it will be on power plant scale where you run it like a chemical factory and store GWatt/hours.
A pig or cattle farm can collect the waste and process it into fuel. Many do.
Look up Red Flow in Australia 🇦🇺 , one of their owners has a farm in northern tasmania with solar and flow batteries
@@hillvalley6716
Looks very interesting. Thanks for the tip.
@@lunatik9696 how do they do it. Is it costy?
I just bought a robot vacuum for $100 dollars. 10% of what the one you're pushing costs. Mine also laser maps the house and is very efficient and quiet. I have to empty my bin every time but I also have a much smaller charging station so I'm happy with it
Damn, you put this out 4 days late on IPO. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Damn, didn't know it just IPOed, still buying it though
i AGREE this will really work for grid scale storage. Self monitoring of the service items and reporting to maintenance office would solve the equipment wear problem.
Moving parts: lots of things in the home have moving parts. Fridges, heat pumps, robotic vacuum cleaners... I suspect with more iterations a flow battery can reduce the number of parts and their size.
I suspect they are already using the same off-the-shelf parts anyway. What's different to a pump that pumps salt water and a pump that pumps rusty salt water?
@@gbjbaanb even pumps are continously improved, reluctance e-motors are developed for the purpose and the new piston motor/pump is 30% more efficient.
Part count can be offset if you increase the size of the system. Huge tanks, huge pumps. In relation to the capacity of the system you can have reasonable part counts.
Imagine having a big power plant vs a ton of smaller generators.
But having multiple container sized systems also has its benefit. Yeah sure part count is high, but you gain redundancy. Instead of losing the whole system in case of failure, you just lose a unit.
Every time you cover a grid scale energy storage technology you need to ask, point blank, what’s the round trip energy efficiency. 50 60 70 95%?? That’s one of the most important things to know about this since it has such a huge bearing on the economics of such a solution. An inexpensive design or inexpensive sustaining cost is great but it’s only half the story.
Were they unwilling to answer? That would be a huge red flag.
I don't know about this one but the ZnBr plating battery from Redflow is said to be as efficient as pumped storage (around 80%). Not only can it be charged to 100% and discharged to zero, it must be discharged to 0 every three days or so to clean off the plates of Zn completely.
Looking at the cost trend of solar panels combined with increasing panel efficiency I think utilities will just oversize the arrays to make up the difference. Besides solar production now is absurdly high May through September, and low in December and January, I think the annual swing will be more to difficult to solve then day and night load balancing during summer months. To your point, the overall efficiency would matter most during the short cloudy days of winter.
Great video, but can we hear the round trip efficiency and the energy and power densities?
that is the only thing i was waiting for
Of course not!
since they are a water-salt-iron battery it is probably SUPER SUPER low. Since it's grid scale it doesn't matter, build 3 million gallons of tank capacity. Salt batteries have worse power density and iron have bad power to weight. You are likely stuck with the downsides of both to make it work.
The only thing that matters is price per kilowatt ..... Power density is irrelevant
@@13thbiosphere You get the cheap cost of bulk materials (sodium and iron) and the manufacturing costs are far less per kwh. Sodium ion batteries are only 30-40% cheaper than lithium because most of the cost is complexity and specialty of materials.
Their is a way that we should already be using everywhere. Perpetual motion to continually make clean energy for everything. Then reroute all extra energy to the power grid. Soooo much energy for everything.😎👍
Sounds to be very promising technology. I wonder what temperature range these batteries can easily run within?
Thats a good point salt in solution can freeze. I have no idea of tge upper limits of the system. Heat degrades things.
@@johnramirez5032 Salt in solution can freeze and boil. But solute salt circulating and undergoing ionic charge and discharge? I'm not so sure how it would be affected by cold or head. Good observation though!!
I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible for a home installation. We have air conditioners and heaters and water heaters and all kinds of other things that have moving parts and require maintainance. Why not our electricity storage as well?
The space required would also be an issue. Grid scale energy storage is the big winner for this tech. But yah you’re right no reason it couldn’t
Since it seems unlikely consumer size units would be offered, for insurance and liability if nothing else. The homeowner would need to buy one of the standard semi trailer size modules and park it in the side yard. If that fits thier needs and county zoning allows, then sure why not? The modules will run themselves, and the app on your tablet will give real time status, and alarms when maintenance is needed.
@@docwatson1134 I bet they could get it to fit reasonably well in a basement and they seem safe enough. That's kind of what I would have in mind. I could easily see living in a home where my roof is mostly solar and my basement has a big liquid battery.
There will be a small shed sized residential battery I'm sure...just have to compartmentalize the moving parts into one unit that can be switched out with a spare. Send the broken one in for replacement and the depot fixes it and returns it to service.
Nice day to binge watch son da Vinci
Could I get this for my home battery? I'm not worried about the maintenance of checking for leaks or occasionally replacing a pump.
First : I'd like to mention that you are the first I know to report this tech, and this is really great. I like to hear about this kind of stuff, so, good job.
Now, as you are meeting people in these fields, like others, I'd like some numbers. When talking about grid scale storage, energy density is not a factor as you said, but there is lots of other factors. First : Density is still something to take account. If that's like, 1/100 of li-ion density, this may be a problem when you need like 1km² for 1MW. There is some minimums. So the number is still a bit relevant. What about peek power ? Is it ok for grid scale ? What about capacity ? Do they produce modular things to scale it up ?
Last : I'd really, really you to ask one clear question : what is the current problem. You have things to take into account :
-Tech : is everything ready or some R&D is still needed ? If needed, on what points ?
-Cost : Is it cost effective ? Yeah, it have lots of cycles, great point, but still, you know what is the front cost for 1MW versus Li-ion ? And what is the life-cycle duration ? What are maintenance costs ? How costly is it to replace every moving part ?
-Market : If the two first points are okay and good, maybe the market is not really ready yet, or no one want to be the first tester, this is sad, but if that's the case you should mention it because of your audience : you could make marketing to people knowing people who might be interested and promote this.
-Funds : If everything is ready, maybe the problem is that the company lacks a bit of funds to scale up and peek inertia sending and everything. For example, the company may not be big enought to get the economies of scales leading to profit needed to improves and scale up the company (I think that's currently the problem with SMR, mixed with market acceptancy, though it's only my opinion).
-Dates : when was the tech ready ? If that's last year, maybe if everything is right, that may take some times to hit the market.
The 3 first points are crucial for every new tech related stuff. If you are talking about something new, I really want to hear WHY this is not everywhere. For example, the aluminium-air "battery" has some SERIOUS problems with no charge possible. It's still interesting to know the tech, but anything has drawbacks (almost) and if someone tells you there is no drawbacks, then they are hidding something. And this may be huge, blocking and the tech may lead nowhere. Thus it is not a company for selling a product, but a lab center for developping things, making R&D and taking funds to do that. R&D, Labs are not at all a problem even when working on seemingly not-working techs, because you never know what you're gonna find. But when you mix this with lying and dissimulation, it quickly leads to a scam.
Numbers are essential to estimate if this is ever going to scale up. How does one charge-discharge cycle look like? How does a thousand cycles? This is little better than an infomercial without data.
Great video, this sounds very promising. I would love to see an AMBRI vs ESS technology comparison (not how, but how well).
Love what you're doing.👍
that a good idea Doug thank you!
The other riders made fun of Leonardo, he couldn't control his horse. He realized a single bit in the animal's mouth was insufficient and added another. His friends started calling him "Two Bit daVinci".
hahah!
This seems very promising and well thought out. Right up there with liquid air energy storage in terms of materials, scalability, durability, and cost. I will be rooting for them. Let’s see what happens.
I think this and/or liquid metal batteries will prove to fix the energy storage problem.
I heard about redux flow batteries 3 years ago. So is nothing new for me. They initially proposed to be used in cars. But, this adds a lot of weight. But for grid storage / on-demand power supply are excellent. Created a battery with materials that are abundant on earth crust - priceless!
Thank you for interviewing the people who are making this tech. Great episode. I hope this tech works out with the plentiful resources this tech uses. Is there a safety issue with the hydrogen that's a byproduct?
They mentioned that solution; the hydrogen is necessarily reinserted into the solution by the proton pump to maintain pH and electrolyte balance.
@@AndrewThoesen I understand that. However, hydrogen is small and leaks through almost anything containing it. Is it in a form that is combustible if it leaks out?
@@Architeuthis87
Hydrogen is stored and transported in industry to make ammonia for fertilizer. They use mild, low carbon steel without any problems of embrittlement or leakage. This seems to be a scare tactic from Big Oil to put fear, uncertainty and doubt into people's minds. Nonsense!
On a large scale, pumped hydro makes much more sense. With batteries we pay by the watt-hour but with pumped storage (or the less efficient but much more versatile hydrogen) we pay by the watt with a very small premium for additional capacity. Batteries have nightmarish problems as large scale storage as well, mostly environmental costs.
I retired from a Fortune 100 electric company 3 years ago, after we had our first lithium battery fire but before we had the one that severely injured four firemen. I took that one hard - after the first it was clear they are practically designed to kill firemen. The problem is inherent in any high capacity storage battery, but is not serious until we try to store more energy than the battery can absorb as heat if everything goes wrong.
Thank you! Nice to hear some positive news.
We also need energy storage facilities in multiple places around America. So all that extra energy has somewhere to be stored until needed for other things.
I'd like to see a comparison with green hydrogen storage.
Not to be a party pooper but Green Hydrogen can't even compete with gasoline. Operating an EV is much cheaper than gasoline which is much cheaper than hydrogen(Green Hydrogen is the most expensive hydrogen).
@@wineberryred Current energy prices you are correct, however As Intermittent renewables like wind and solar Become a bigger and bigger chunk of the grid the amount of surplus energy available on normal days if on normal days is going to push the price of electricity down. If that happens green hydrogen becomes much cheaper Is, moreover hydrogen electrolysis at scale isn't really being done at the moment so I suspect that mass scale production Will push these prices down further. Do I think that hydrogen will be used for Ground transport or energy storage? No if bridge? No however I think it will have a place in aviation particularly if The modernized Zeppelin's Become a thing.
@@mrspeigle1 round trip effeciency of hydrogen is too low to be economically viable. When energy us cheap because of oversupply you are better off chargin EVs than making hydrogen.
There are a few great and promising Hydrogen technologies and they will have a place, but they are not solutions for the same problems. Right now, there are very few real "green" hydrogen production techniques and they lack the efficiencies for grid storage.
@@mrspeigle1 Ammonia can be used for energy transport through pipelines made of carbon steel that aren't treated to provide transportation of hydrogen.
Chemical engineer here... Somehow I have never heard of this tech. Thank you!
I would like to know how these compare to Redflow's Zinc bromine flow batteries, I think they have the worlds smallest residential flow battery.
Thank you. THAT is what I was looking for.
The first thought about where to store it that came to me was under road infrastructure (placed on top of the geothermal system, of course!) Our roads cover an *INCREDIBLE* amount of space that can't be used for anything else and vehicles have *VERY* low ground pressure when compared to buildings/etc., so burying things that take up a lot of space (like flow batteries and geothermal grids) seems like a perfect match to me.
Geothermal power plants do not need batteries because the steam is available 24/7 & 365 days a year.
@@acmefixer1 While the energy might be available 24/7/365, *enough* energy might not be at a particular time. By storing energy when demand is low, it can be released when demand is higher than production can sustain.
How much energy does one of those container sized modules hold? And granted, costs should come down over time, but how much do they cost?
I saw a flow battery that they were developing for residential use. It was a zinc-bromide battery, and they offeres maintenance services, the same way any appliance works.
I suppose the question is how fast can you charge / discharge? Can they help with grid stabilisation? The Tesla big battery in Australia is capable of ramping from 0 to 100MW in 140 milliseconds.
I can see an eventual tiered hybrid system, with ultra super capacitors able to supply high levels of current for brief times, but with nearly infinite cycle life, then LiON or LFP to provide a longer 4-8 hours, with flow batteries and other tech supplying storage measure in days.
With the ever falling price of solar, it's cheaper to double of triple the installed base of production than it is to have weeks of battery storage. Industries will crop up that can use the excess energy, which in sunnier climates is likely for the majority of the year.
You said: " ... it's cheaper to double of triple the installed base of production than it is to have weeks of battery storage. "
Yeah, but the sun is only up roughly half of the day on a yearly average. Some industries can shut down at night but many or most need to operate 24/7 and I don't just go to sleep when the sun goes down, do you? Renewable energy needs an energy buffer regardless of the type (solar/wind). And who said anything about "weeks of storage", a week is likely enough for most places.
Bring on the competition! We can only benefit. Customers will decide! Thanks for bringing the concept forward!
It would be interesting to see how cost effective this is in real terms and how does it handle heat or cold, would it adapt to Arizona or Alaska. How is the system effected by temperature. How would electric rates differ from what we have now to using a system like this. I like the idea, it seems very good but I have seen many good ideas over the years that never come to be. Could it be scaled down to off grid home/cabin use or is it just to expensive to do so. Can the system be refurbish at the end of its life cycle or will it simply be added to the trash pile like millions of batteries end up now. Could something like this be added to nuclear power plants that don't throttle up and down well to smooth out the energy needs as energy consumption rises and falls thru the business day. How many of these trailers would it take to store the energy of a city with say 100K people. Would it make more sense to have one giant power storage centrally located with a system like this or would several smaller substations be more efficient.
Lastly how much potential is there yet to be gained from more energy efficient homes and businesses that can help reduce the need for massive power plants and help make systems like this more feasible.
@Douglas W
If you had listened to what he said, you would have heard him say that it is not something that would be used for a home residence or small scale.
You're trying to spread propaganda about lithium batteries filling up landfills and that's pure nonsense. They're far too valuable to spread on landfills; a used EV battery could be sold for more than $10,000. The valuable chemicals are recycled. And many countries have laws requiring recycling batteries.
@@acmefixer1 you must not have very good reading comprehension or have misunderstood my comments. I am not trying in any way to spread propaganda I am simply asking how much can be recycled and how viable the system is. I have seen many great ideas come and go in my lifetime never to make it to the market place or fall short of the promised intensions. I actually have high hopes for many of these systems as man kind can not continue consuming and wasting like we have for the last 100 years. Systems that may work well in one part of the country hot/cold may now work as well in other areas. In the future we may need different solutions for different climates and regions of the country. A great example is nuclear power is great until it isn't, decommissioning a power plant can be astronomically expensive and what do you do with all the waste. The cheap energy that you get in the beginning isn't so cheap in the end at cleanup time.
Great topic and video! Thanks.
I need to understand the electrochemistry, because from your description, it’s not clear that this really is a true flow battery. That, since you described electroplating onto one of the electrodes, which means that the reactions are not entirely within the reactants pumped through it.
Bigger picture though:
- A rechargeable battery contains all of its reactants, and its reaction can be reversed.
- A one-time-use battery is the same except its reactions that produces electricity are not reversible.
- Electoplating is the opposite: What is essentially a battery-charging process is not reversible. The ion flow through the electrolyte leaving you with a crust of metal on the electrode.
- A fuel cell is a battery containing only the electrical components, and the chemicals flow through it, but those reactions are not reversible.
- A flow battery is like a fuel cell, but where the reactions are reversible.
This seems to be something else in that the electrode materials are involved in at least on of the electrode reactions.
Fuel cells can run at higher than ambient temperature. This doesn't seem to get hot.
Great video Ricky!!
Great Camera work Robert!!
@@EditorNchief I learned from the best ;)
Sounds like a very good solution to power grid style storage ! Not sure the cost comparisons to other storage types for the long run as a maintenance program would be part of this system but eventually everything requires some sort of maintenance...
Sounds like a good job market.
Did they mention roundtrip efficiency? What are those power and energy density statistics?
Hopefully at least the money was good for these ads, both of them...
Leaving out key parameters is always a red flag.
Energy density or weight per kWh is less critical for stationary storage. All about the $$$ per kWh!
@@xiaoka still needed to get an idea of the size per unit storage, and per unit output.
Apparently theoretical energy density is 170 Wh/kg. It is comparable with older types of Li-Ion batteries, but the volumetric density is lower, probably 120-150 Wh/L. Plus add the mass and volume of all the infrastructure. Also boosting 1,21V to 320V or more is not a great idea - efficiency drops with rise of voltage difference...
Goggle says around 70% which is less than Li-ion but still useful for > 4hr grid storage. Biggest thing is getting production ramped to lower costs.
Redflow - Zinc-Bromide Flow Batteries!!!
I think you have reason to be exited. From the flow systems i have seen, this on seem really tight and together, as we say in the music biz. I believe it would be good for farms, as farmers are used to handling maschinery, and chemicals. I would buy shares in that company. 🇩🇰🙋🏻♂️🌞👩🏻🚀🇺🇸
Their single container 33kW system seems perfect for large farms, where you maybe want to use solar to be independent of grid issues (and might have a bit of distance to the grid, leading to instability), but need stability. My electricity comes from far away, and even just a little bit of wind in a pretty large region between me and the nearest power station leads to me sitting in the dark. I have seriously considered solar + battery, because home office without power sucks dead rats through garden hoses (to quote Jeri Ellisworth)
I don't understand the technology but I appreciate the call for more localized infrastructure rather than grid dependence upon miles of pylons supporting many more miles of high voltage cabling. Localized energy generation with corresponding local bulk storage batteries, all serviced/maintained locally sounds very appealing.
What's the round trim efficiency? What's the capital cost per GWh of storage..
Rarely get this, the most important of information of all. Until we have this info, the rest is.. whatever...
This looks like promising solution for southern countries.... However northern countries have winters with minus degees (in Celsius) and the main component of the battery is water...
Not water, it uses salt water.
Interesting video, and thanks, but...
You don't inspire confidence when you mix up amps (current) with amp-hours (amount of charge) and also get it wrong by a factor of 1,000.
You said "fifty-two hundred amp battery" when you meant "five point two amp-hours" or "fifty-two hundred milliamp-hours". Even then, Watt-hours would be more useful because it would tell us how much work the thing can do before it goes flat :-)
my second video from this channel.
This is one of the most promising solar technology I have seen, so far.
subscribed.
Glad to hear it Robert!
We have unlimited salt water and iron from all the old cars!!
true!
You are missing a few things. Flow batteries cant do what big installations of lithium batteries like the Tesla Hornsdale installation in South Australia do. The difference is lithium can discharge super quickly which means they are the best solution for frequency control on the grid. Because you can make alot of money in the frequency control space this has been implemented first and they are still learning what these installations are capable of. But you dont need alot of frequency control compared to baseload storage.
Flow batteries are best suited as long term energy storage that can be used as a replacement for baseload, you just have to install enough of them, and that is alot. It would most definitely be a waste to use lithium for baseload storage when flow batteries can do the job.
There are some flow batteries usable in the home like a powerwall. The Redflow Zinc bromine flow battery for example is smaller than the examples in your video and can be used at residential level , in cellphone towers as backup systems, or scaled up to grid level or any size in between.
Thank you for great video! My favourite grid-storage battery, so far. I especially like the fact that the waste produced is nothing more than salt, iron and water. The stumbling blocks, I don't think are really problematic, just not seen from the right perspective. One thing we had to learn a looooooong time ago, is that humans are the only creators of waste. There's no waste in nature, just another component on the giant cyclical production line of the cosmos. We just want to control energy and information for profit, like so many things. And the same greed is and will stop us from reaching the 2030 and 2050 goals. We have not learned from the history of non-cooperation between Tesla and Edison and many more, "intelligent" men, besides. Today we have all these companies, again competing and not sharing and this time it's not just about copper mines. But all will be as it will be. It is written. GG! PTL & BLESSINGS
There is a _lot_ of waste in nature, and it will eventually doom large organisms. Since the dawn of multicellular plants and animals life have ingested carbon and taken it to the grave. Estimates vary, but we have somewhere between about 17% and 6% of our original surface carbon left. Vast amounts will never be free; marine organisms have converted it to calcium carbonate. We now have large limestone deposits, but those are estimated to be less than 5% of what is at the bottom of the oceans. Now shortsighted humans are trying to bury carbon even faster so it will not be available... ever.
@@flagmichael I meant nature doesn't produce wasted materials, just us and we have forgotten not to swim against the stream/current...
I've recently been watching some of your videos and find yours extremely informative and well done.
I thinking also of your 3M video I saw recently.
I have been pondering for some time now why aren't lead acid batteries split and separated into separate components, like pumping and storing electrolytes into external tanks and thus storing larger amounts of electrical energy.
I now see this is "in general" what Flow Batteries are all about. So good news!.
I must say theatrically YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY A ⭐⭐⭐ 5 STAR ⭐⭐ 0:21 presenter and salesman
- Paul
I wonder what the salt is. They said it is a kind of fertilizer. My guess is ammonium-nitrate.
Datasheet says potassium chloride
The thing is to get the LCOE cost down below lifepo4. The mining / raw materials crunch is going to be real so something that is low cost, lasts a long time, hence material needs is low, is safe, pretty non-toxic and cheap/easy to recycle is going to be interesting.
Let's see salt water and iron equals rust it's a rust battery
Salt water ➕ iron ➕ oxygen =rust. No one, no rust.
Tesla is moving to LFP batteries in stationary storage in place of variations of the LNMC batteries that are used in cars. The 20,000 cycle life applications, it is critical that they have daily charge cycles. This type of battery is perfect for storing wind and solar electricity. Lets keep LFP and LMNC batteries for use in cars, trucks and similar applications. For the next 10+ years we will not be able to make adequate quantity of batteries for mobile applications.
I agree!!
flow battery seems to be best grid storage so far
Interesting story.
That first guy didn't know that a lithium cell is between about 3 and 4 volts - he suggested it would be half a volt. Doesn't inspire confidence.
From what he said it's not the avoidance of series stacking that gives their solution voltage stability, it's the choice of using a dc-dc converter. Which is probably exactly what the lithium cell systems do too, they just do it with a series battery at a higher voltage. Their extra low voltage system must have crazy high current, which itself brings challenges and isn't necessarily going to be the most efficient from the pov of the electronics.
Now, the fact of continuously circulating your electrolyte for fresh presumably also helps with voltage stability - but he didn't say that.
The biggest problem with this version of a flow battery is the fact that it's two components that need to be added to increase CAPACITY (kilowatt-hours), electrolyte storage and plating area. Other flow batteries ONLY need to increase the amount of electrolyte. If POWER (kilowatts) needs to be increased, then the number or size of the plates need to be increased. So if one starts at 5 kwh @ 1kw draw but then needs to upgrade to 10 kwh @ 1kw, one only has to add more electrolyte to double the capacity. Using the Iron Flow battery, one would need to increase both electrolye AND plate number/size, a much more costly upgrade. On the other hand, if one wants to increase POWER (kilowatts) say from 1 kw to 2kw, only the number/size of the plates need be doubled. So a proper design would be to design the system with enough power at the start and the minimal capacity then add more capacity over time as need changes or as finances allow.
So it absolutely makes sense what you're saying because there are things that are not stationary and for those things you would need more densely energy like lithium iron or lithium phosphite but for grid I mean you don't even need a flow battery you could also use capacitors you could have a capacitor that's the size of a skyscraper that would be relatively cheap to build and the advantage of that is that it will charge very quickly and if you have enough of those even though it takes up more space hypothetically a power grid doesn't really need to be densely packed it could use a little more space and be more sustainable
I'm impressed I I need to get one of these flow batteries because it sounds a lot more sustainable then conventional batteries
The important numbers are cost per KWH, installation cost and maintenance. If it can match or beat conventional battery packs it will succeed.
I guess the proton pump is more efficient than electrolysing out oxygen gas and adding extra water, but it will be more complicated. Considering some people are seriously considering thermal energy storage, I wonder how much efficiency really matters?
Such a system, if simplified, would be actually rather easy for a hobbyist to build too.
Hope this succeeds, definitely looks like the most promising solution to grid storage I’ve seen, so long as the other electrode material isn’t too exotic. Also it’s more of a hybrid flow battery, like a hybrid rocket motor.
We need to greatly invest in this. Use it for specific purposes, only think about large scale, don't worry about small uses leave that for lithium ion. It's cool it was in Oregon. I live in Oregon. 👍
I love how people just assume putting something like this "outside of the City, where there's lots room" is ok with the people who live in those places. If your don't want it in your back yard why do you think I want it in mine?
You were very quick on the weather, how is it changing ?the past predictions have not been right .the sea ,level is stable,now continue pushing the narrative!!!!!!!
I think the niche available to flow batteries is quite small. Items:
A) They all suffer from cross contamination between anolyte and catholyte. Expensive to deal with, only vanadium type fully avoids it, most expensive type.
B) Advantage is for high kwhr storage per kw rating, but that market is lower priced $/kwhr than the fast short-time market that Lion works in. Iron flow depends on plating iron onto cathode, eliminates advantage of flow batteries of adding kwhr by adding tanks of reactants.
C) If this system were viable, it would own the Megapack market Tesla sells to. There's a deal breaker in there somewhere. The vanadium flow has been commercial scale since 20+ years.
This could also be applied to local, subdivision level storage - use it during peak demand or grid outages so it is exercised and helps reduce the peak generation needs of the grid...
As long as your HOA is honest and keeps up the maintenance. Or have the electric company manage it
I agree, I'm excited for this tech. I see it very suited for large solar or wind farms out in large open areas, such as unused semi-arid or arid land across the south of the US. Because of the lack of storage density though it would be harder to incorporate in dense infrastructure, so close to cities or even farmland.
We'll have plenty of data about it though since they're already deployed and obviously deploying more.
Noone it's still in development stage
@@seapirate7770 No, they've been deployed. Look up the company.
The Tesla Powerwall (and similar products) do have some moving parts: They tend to have some fans for cooling purposes. The transformer in particular can get hot during operation. That said, good fans admittedly do have a very low probablilty of failure even over years and years of operation.