Sierra Leone Vanadium Flow Battery

The vanadium flow battery (VFB) as one kind of energy storage technique that has enormous impact on the stabilization and smooth output of renewable energy. Key materials like membranes, electrode, and electrolytes will finally determine the performance of VFBs.

Kibo Energy will roll out CellCube's vanadium flow battery across projects in the Southern Africa region. Image: Enerox/Cellcube. CellCube has signed a five-year agreement with an energy asset developer to deploy 1GW-plus of its vanadium redox flow batteries (VFRBs) in Southern Africa.

Giant devices called flow batteries, using tanks of electrolytes capable of storing enough electricity to power thousands of homes for many hours, could be the answer. But most flow batteries rely on vanadium, a somewhat rare and expensive metal, and alternatives are short-lived and toxic.

Vanadium has become a popular electrolyte component because the metal charges and discharges reliably for thousands of cycles. Rongke Power, in Dalian, China, for example, is building the world's largest vanadium flow battery, which should come online in 2020. The battery will store 800 megawatt-hours of energy, enough to power thousands of homes.

As an important branch of RFBs, all-vanadium RFBs (VRFBs) have become the most commercialized and technologically mature batteries among current RFBs due to their intrinsic safety, no pollution, high energy efficiency, excellent charge and discharge performance, long cycle life, and excellent capacity-power decoupling .

In the 10 October issue of Nature Chemistry, for example, researchers led by Leroy Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, reported a polyoxometalate flow battery that stores up to 40 times as much charge as vanadium cells of the same volume.