Despite their advantages, until now redox flow batteries have not had a significant cost advantage over batteries and had a shorter service life. But researchers at Warwick University in the UK, in cooperation with colleagues at Imperial College London, say they have found a way to dramatically reduce the cost of redox flow batteries to £20 per kWh or less using inexpensive materials like manganese and sulfur which are found in abundance nature. They claim the cost of materials for their new battery is about 1/30th that of the materials needed for a lithium ion battery, which may use expensive elements like cobalt. Their research was published recently in the journal Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Dr Barun Chakrabarti, one of the lead authors on the paper, says “This EPD technique is not only simple but also improves the efficiencies of three different economical hybrid flow batteries thereby increasing their potential for widespread commercial adoption for grid-scale energy storage.” If what the researchers say holds up in real world use, the world of renewable energy and energy storage just took a big step forward.
See Researchers Claim Redox Flow Battery Breakthrough Will Cost $25 Per kWh Or Less
#environment #gridstorage #batteries
Energy storage will be a huge part of the renewable energy revolution. Electricity doesn’t keep like cheese or barley. It has to be used more or less instantaneously or it is lost forever. Curtailment is the polite phrase the utility industry uses to describe the process of selling excess electricity. In some cases, the energy