I have posted on flow batteries in the past but little since as it appeared quiet. Here we have another similar protocol entering the market and it seems to meet cost goal posts.
As I have posted many times, a cheap static battery is badly needed in the energy business and yes the household. We need to be able to acquire and store energy cheaply and intermittently. The net effect of such technology would be to double at least the overall efficiency of the grid.
In one specific application I even looked at good old lead zinc acid battery that we all know so well. When you build a large tank of sulphuric acid with large plates of metal, you are good to go for twenty years or more. Just do not think you will ever move it. The technical problems we all associate with the type comes from trying to minimize weight for the transport business.
A flow battery is way more appealing and these guys look to have produced the next generation solution to the above described static battery problem.
If they can deliver cheap then they will be installed everywhere.
Flow Batteries Coming Into Homes?
For approximately $7,500, you might soon be able to get a 30-kilowatt-hour flow battery to match your solar panels.
The North Reading, Mass.-based company is currently working on a device called the HomeFlow, a scaled-down version of the zinc bromide flow batteries it currently sells to industrial customers. The HomeFlow will store approximately 30 kilowatt-hours of energy, have a 10-kilowatt rating, and cost around $7,500, said Doug Alderton, director of government sales at the company during a session at the Emerging Technologies Summit earlier this week in Sacramento
The price includes an inverter, so if you are linking it up to a solar system, your costs will be lower.
The ambitious company seems to want to become the Dell Computers of flow batteries. It plans on bringing out a variety of flow batteries -- ranging from the HomeFlow to a 6 megawatt-hour/2-megawatt behemoth that would function like a power plant -- based around a basic building block made from 54 cells. (Dell, in its heyday, mastered the art of designing a few basic SKUs and tweaking them to produce a complete product line.)
Just above the HomeFlow in the product line is the ZincFlow, a 45-kilowatt-hour/15 kilowatt machine. The LocalFlow is next in the line at 100 kilowatt hours/30 kilowatts. The TransFlow 2000, which can hold 2.8 megawatt-hours of energy, has a 500 kilowatt rating, and is 53 feet long. The company is in the process of installing five near Syracuse and Sacramento
If successful, the batteries will help delay grid upgrades. Other applications exist as well. Lee Burrows of VantagePoint Venture Partners in an earlier interview suggested that flow batteries could be used to recharge electric cars instead of high-speed charging stations.
And, like Dell, the company wants to make them cheap. Most of Premium's flow batteries cost $250 to $300 a kilowatt hour or $250 to $350 a kilowatt. That's incredibly cheap. Rival Deeya Energy last year came out with flow batteries that cost $4,000 a kilowatt. A123 Systems, which makes lithium ion batteries, makes battery packs that are close to $1,000 a kilowatt hour, said company exec Charliee Vartanian at the same conference.
The company's batteries last 30 years and take up 1/15th of the space of conventional batteries, he added.
Whether and when Premium Power can achieve its goals remains to be seen, but the potential is intriguing. At these rates, storage could be added fairly easily to wind farms and solar arrays. Government officials and developers in Africa have been regularly calling the company to see if Premium's batteries could power microgrids.
Flow batteries pretty much act like their name suggests. A charged electrolyte infused with zinc and bromide ions flows from one tank to another. The trick is in coming up with a battery design that allows the zinc to continually be recycled. After zinc bromide is broken up into its separate elements (a key part of the process for harvesting electrons), the zinc adheres to plates inside the battery. That plate has to be polished before the recharging process can begin again.
Zinc bromide, he added, is a byproduct of shellfish. In other words, there's a lot of it.
Premium Power
Founded in 2002, Premium Power Corporation manufactures the world’s lowest cost, grid scalable flow batteries based on the company’s proprietary Zinc-Flow® advanced energy storage technology. Our products are lower in cost than lead acid batteries up front and roughly equivalent to pumped hydro, at under 2 cents/kWh, on a long-term basis. Our Company is headquartered in North Reading , Massachusetts , USA
Our products offer a number of compelling advantages over alternative energy storage technologies. Primary benefits include:
- Lower initial cost and total cost of ownership;
- Longer operable life with an unlimited number of cycles;
- Fully integrated systems that can be trailer mounted to reduce installation and relocation time and cost;
- Greater energy density; and
- A wide degree of packaging flexibility.
Commercial applications include:
- Utility infrastructure. Reserve power for electric utility facilities that provide transmission and distribution of electricity, providing benefits associated with:
- Asset deferral;
- Peak demand management;
- Voltage support of long radial circuits;
- Energy arbitrage; and
- Ancillary services.
- Bulk energy storage for renewable energy generation assets including wind and solar, to provide:
- Firming;
- Smoothing;
- Time shifting; and
- A reduction in curtailment events.
- Peak-shaving (load shifting) to reduce end-users’ electricity costs by lowering peak demand and time-of-use energy charges.
- Electric power back-up of mission-critical equipment in locations such as wireless cell sites, POPs, central offices, cable communications head-ends, data centers, and utility substations.
All of Premium Power’s products are fully compliant with - and have been certified to - nationally recognized standards, are non-toxic and 100% disposable or recyclable.
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