Flow Batteries

November 27th, 2006

Flow Batteries

Renewable energy technologies, particularly solar generators and wind turbines, are often criticized for their inability to store electricity in large amounts. It looks like this will change soon, as advancements in Flow Batteries are now nearing commercialized applications. onclick="tracking(this); return

Flow batteries are fuel cells that allow the storage of active materials external to the battery and the appropriate reactants circulating through the cell stack. According to MPowerUk, flow batteries were first made of zinc/chlorine and was used as early as 1884! In the Mid seventies the technology regained interest and in 1986, the Vanadium Redox Battery was patented by the University of New South Wales in Australia. This flow battery elimated the problem of cross-contamination by diffusion of ions across the cell's membranes. The vanadium redox battery offers almost unlimited capacity by simply increasing the size of the storage tanks. In addition to tat, it can be left without any charge without affecting the physical storage capacity of the cell and can be recharged by replacing the electrolytes. Its main problem has been the low energy-to-volume ratio compared with standard storage batteries.

VRB Power Systems, Inc. is changing that by proving that mass storage capacity. They have recently signed with a 1.5 MW storage system for the Sorne Hill Wind Farm in Ireland which they say will demonstrate Flow Battery's upgraded storage capacity.Read more here.

Thanks to Axeon Power, which is the source of the image used in this post. You can find the original image here.


Posted in Storage | 3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Flow Batteries”

  1. Barrie Lawson Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 5:51 pm

    Can you please acknowledge the source of the flow battery diagram and also correct the link to MPower which does not work because of the added slash.

  2. reden Says:
    December 19th, 2006 at 12:48 am

    Thanks for the reminder. The image came from http://www.watthead.blogspot.com. I will modify the link in a bit.

  3. Barrie Lawson Says:
    December 22nd, 2006 at 7:54 pm

    Thank you for making the acknowledgement, however the links still do not work because of the added slash at the end of the URL.
    Can you correct please.
    Thanks in advance

Leave a Reply