How do energy-efficient areas take advantage of vanadium redox batteries?

Vanadium redox or VRFB batteries are able to provide free energy to private power communities for more than two years, no problem, according to a summary published by VSUN Energy.

The Perth-based company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Australian Vanadium (ASX: AVL), contacted one of its first customers, the Stuart family, originally from a farming town in the west of Australia, and learned that in the past 30 months do not fail once and, in addition, they did not pay a dime for that.

The Stuarts pioneered the acquisition of a Flow Cell Redox Flow Cell in the country. They use it for a nursery of native trees that they own in the southwestern part of the state where they needed a three-phase power supply instead of electricity. single phase supply provided.

Farmer Lucy Stuart, pioneer in the acquisition of a vanadium redox battery in Australia. Photo of VSUN Energy.

According to VSUN, the CellCube system that they have installed stores the energy of a 15 kW solar photovoltaic system, enough to run for 10 hours at maximum power.

"They also wanted to be able to improve the power supply if they were to expand the nursery further.With the VRFB, increasing power simply requires another vanadium electrolyte reservoir," said the renewable energy company in a press release.

By relying on a vanadium electrolyte solution contained in storage tanks, vanadium redox flow batteries can store energy from renewable sources, including energy. solar, wind or wave, and release it if necessary.

The VSUN documentation indicates that the batteries can be charged and discharged at the same time and that they can be cycled often and deeply. They are also expected to have a lower fire risk than lithium batteries.

Vanadium occurs naturally in about 65 minerals and fossil fuel deposits. It is produced from steel foundry slag, heavy oil stack dust, as a by-product of uranium mining or directly from magnetite. The latter is the most common method.

About 98% of the extracted vanadium ore is mined in South Africa, Russia, China and Brazil, and most of it is used in steelmaking applications. However, the importance of silver in the energy sector is also increasing rapidly, with more than 5% of global production being used for energy storage.

This growing interest in the battery sector has led to higher prices for vanadium, which has increased 450% over the past three years and more than doubled in 2018.