The Energy Storage Digital Series, an online-only conference and webinar series, produced and hosted by the events division of our publisher Solar Media kicked off yesterday. Here are some highlights and key quotes from opening panel discussion: Predicting the energy storage tech of the future.
You can still sign up to join the rest of the sessions – free of charge – and you can also watch sessions from previous days on demand.
Predicting the energy storage tech of the future
A panel moderated by Clean Horizon head of market analysis Corentin Baschet featured Dr Billy Wu, energy technologies and systems expert and senior lecturer at Imperial College, a London University, alongside Matt Allen, CEO and co-founder of UK-based project developer Pivot Power and Jim Stover, who is chief marketing officer at VRB Energy, a vanadium flow battery manufacturer based in North America with a subsidiary company in China.
While a poll found that the event’s viewers believe that lithium-ion will continue to be the technology that dominates the industry still in three to five years’ time – a finding that came as no surprise to any of the panellists – there’s still a lot of scope for other technologies to complement lithium in today’s market and the future may see other options coming to the fore.
Imperial College’s Billy Wu said that hydrogen is finally starting to be seen as a potential mainstream contender, partly due to its versatility in being applicable for heat when added to the gas grid and for producing electricity through fuel cells. Wu said that every year felt like it got closer to the year that hydrogen can break through. There could also be a knock-on beneficial impact for flow batteries in terms of cost reduction if this became the case, Wu said, as electrolysers and flow batteries are likely to share many of the same components.
All of the above, but in intelligently designed proportions
While lithium-ion has obviously enjoyed the ongoing effect of scaled-up manufacturing through its use in consumer electronics and more recently electric vehicles, VRB Energy’s Jim Stover argued that the cost reduction curve of vanadium flow batteries has really only begun. VRB believes it can achieve cost reductions of around 10% to 15% with each doubling of manufacturing capacity, Stover said. Stover also played up the possible non-financial advantages of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs): they are non-flammable and, partly due to the fact they use liquid electrolyte storing the power in tanks separate from the battery cell stack where power is generated, are not expected to suffer the same problem of cell degradation as is seen in lithium-ion energy storage.
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