Ann: **anintha Diamond Drilling Underway, page-56

Although it has been a slow haul from Skyllas-Kazacos' pioneering work at the University of New South Wales, vanadium redox flow batteries are now taking off worldwide. Mass production is starting, a 1.5MW system has been installed at a semi-conductor factory in Japan and China sees vanadium batteries as a big part of its energy future.
The company that was commercialising the technology in Australia, Pinnacle VRB, however, decided to devote itself to coal seam gas instead, leaving the batteries without a local champion. Worse still, when the large prototype installed to store wind-generated energy on King Island ran into trouble there was no local vanadium developer around to fix it.
Rights to the technology have now been returned to UNSW, who are negotiating with companies for local developers. Meanwhile Skyllas-Kazacos is working on what she calls second generation vanadium batteries. These take bromine's solubility, and incorporate it with her work on vanadium. "Instead of a zinc-bromide solution you have vanadium-bromide. Vanadium ions are formed and everything stays in solution, rather than plating metals over and over again, which is hard," she says.
While there are still technical problems to solve, the highly soluble vanadium-bromide electrolytes offer the possibility of batteries that store plenty of energy for a given weight, release this energy quickly when required, are highly reliable and capable of charging and discharging thousands of times with little loss of performance.
One day these batteries may store the power generated by wind and solar for use when the wind isn't blowing and the sun is not shining. Or they may simply take the edge of peak demand. Either way, all players in the energy industry have much to gain by charging down the battery path.