Storage market seeing explosive growth
Energy storage is predicted to see explosive growth in coming years. According to the Energy Storage Association, the US market alone grew to 280 megawatts (MW) in 2016 and is expected to reach nearly 500MW in 2017 and over 1,600MW by 2020, with one research house predicting growth of 50-60% per annum for the next decade from a base of roughly 900MW.
Lithium ion technology currently dominates the storage market, but deployment of vanadium batteries in large storage projects is also increasing.
Vanitec estimates the amount of vanadium deployed in installed or awarded VRFB systems has grown from 200 MTV in 2015 to 300 MTV in 2016 to 5000MTV in 2017.
Accordingly, the ability to guarantee supply of vanadium for VRFBs will remain essential to the success of these systems in the medium and long term, said Bushveld.
