Vanadium batteries could be key to solar revolution https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/environment/2023/10/28/australian-vanadium-battery-revolution
Vanadium batteries’ sustainable energy hailed as key to solar revolution
Vanadium could be the answer to using solar and wind round the clock, silencing critics who say they’re useless when the sun doesn’t shine and breeze isn’t blowing.
Marion Rae
28 Oct, 2023
Excerpt
So-called flow batteries may be more expensive up front but last for decades, don’t catch fire and can store and dispatch sunshine for 10 to 18 hours.
In contrast, rows of lithium-ion batteries springing up around the country are handy backup to meet peak energy demand for a few hours at a time.
Australia has vast reserves of vanadium but most of the world’s supply is sourced from China, Russia and South Africa and goes into making steel alloy.
That is rapidly changing as allies eye the potential of an end-to-end chain – from mine to electricity grid – in Australia.
Chief commercial officer Matt Harper at Invinity, the British company behind the southern hemisphere’s largest vanadium flow battery, told AAP the company is in talks with local developers to use Australian vanadium within two to four years.
“Lithium batteries have done a great job at showing many problems on the grid can be solved by batteries,” he says.
’24 hours a day’
“We want to be able to take solar power and make it available 24 hours a day.”
In coming years, Invinity aims to use the technology with vanadium that is mined in Australia and manufacture for the domestic market.
Because the technology is built around vanadium that is suspended in the electrolyte, a solution inside the battery, it doesn’t require giga-factories to make them.
“We are definitely looking at doing that in-country,” Mr Harper says.
He says blending the vanadium into the liquid electrolyte is an intermediate step that could also be done in Australia.