Vanadium flow battery partners sign agreement to develop gigafactory in Australia

ByAndy Colthorpe

November 24, 2022

Asia & Oceania, Southeast Asia & Oceania

Commercial, Grid Scale, Off Grid

Business, Technology

mustang vanadium M&A — CellCube is the trading name of Enerox, headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Image: Enerox/Cellcube.

Flow battery maker CellCube and energy storage developer North Harbour Clean Energy are in talks to build factory in Australia with 1GW/8GWh annual production capacity.

CellCube, headquartered in Europe, said today that it has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with North Harbour Clean Energy (NHCE) for the construction of an assembly and manufacturing line of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB) in the Australian east.

The partners want to target opportunities for long-duration energy storage (LDES) assets like flow batteries to participate in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM).

As the transition to renewable energy accelerates, there is projected to be a growing need for energy storage in the NEM to fill in gaps when the sun or wind aren’t shining or blowing and meet peaks in energy demand which don’t match up with those generation profiles.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which oversees the NEM said in June that by 2050, that need will total about 46GW/640GWh.

That strongly suggests technologies that offer several hours of storage duration or more will need to be prominent in that mix, alongside plenty of lithium-ion batteries and other technologies that will be more in the >1-4 hour duration range.

NHCE founder and managing director Tony Schultz said today that the pair will review and select a site to deliver production capacity “of at least 40MW/160MWh” and with a longer-term target of 1,000MWh/8,000MWh per year. However, Schultz did not put a timeframe on those aspirations

Initially, CellCube and NHCE will turn their focus to co-developing what would be Australia’s biggest VRFB project to date. Based on CellCube’s proprietary technology, that would be a 4MW/16MWh system.

In terms of their manufacturing ambitions, what comes next is a feasibility study and other work towards a Final Investment Decision on what would be a 50:50 owned joint venture (JV).