AVL: Preparing for a rerate., page-454

Great find. I have extracted the following from the article (and underlined portions for emphasis):

Vanadium vs. Lithium

While investors are busy focusing on lithium ion batteries and its explosive demand and application in the mobile battery space, vanadium batteries are quietly making an entry into a rapidly growing utility grid-scale energy storage sector.
INC.com reported the following:

“On Monday, Tesla officially brought a new energy storage facility online at a plant 40 miles east of Los Angeles. With 396 refrigerator-sized stacks of lithium-ion batteries, the plant uses energy collected from the sun and the electric grid to power 15,000 homes for about four hours in the evening.”
While Tesla’s cause was noble with its utility-scale lithium-ion battery deployment, this battery project will eventually prove to be a costly failure.
Lithium-ion batteries are not ideally suited for grid-level energy storage because they have a short-duration and discharge run-time cycle and begin to degrade after a few hundred discharge cycles (i.e., 1,000 cycles at most). Vanadium redox flow batteries (VRBs), however, can operate for 10,000 cycles over 20 years. Vanadium batteries can also scale up while decreasing unit storage costs, whereas the unit cost of lithium batteries increases when sizing up.
The adoption of VRBs is still in its infancy with less than 500 MW (0.5 GW) of installed capacity at the global level, while the combined capacity of solar and wind energy was at 550 GW in 2016. This, according to IRENA, was up from 100 GW in 2007.
Currently, there is a lot of pent-up demand for VRBs, and this does not even count any future growth in wind and solar capacity. GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association estimate that the utility-scale energy storage market will grow to 2.6 GW by 2022 with potential to grow much larger.
Source: GTM Research/ESA U.S. Energy Storage Monitor: Q2 2017 Executive Summary


Could Elon Musk soon discover vanadium batteries?
Vanadium Investment

Vanadium is the key ingredient in VRBs, and vanadium price has gone up 500% from its 2016 low of $2.50/lb. The price has doubled since I began covering the metal in December 2016. The following is 18-month price chart of vanadium pentoxide.

Source: Asianmetal.com
There is no commodity exchange or ETF for the vanadium metal. One can gain vanadium exposure by owning shares in vanadium mining companies.
The three largest vanadium producing countries are China, Russia, and South Africa. These three countries account for over 80% of the global vanadium production. That being said, I would not recommend a mining investment in those countries.
While there are currently no operating primary vanadium mines in North America but Prophecy Development Corp. (TSX: PCY) (OTCPKRPCF) is looking to fast track the development of its Gibellini vanadium deposit, 250 miles east of Tesla’s gigafactory in Nevada, and could potentially become the first primary vanadium mine in the United States. The following is Prophecy's three-year stock price chart:
Source: Stockwatch.com

Vanadium deserves the attention as an investment due to its potential future demand from vanadium battery manufacturers. It is already embarking on a stealth bull that few talk about. While there is a possibility of the lithium ion battery replacement, vanadium batteries are here to stay.

Fundamentals aside, from a contrarian viewpoint, the lack of vanadium coverage by mainstream media (e.g., Bloomberg, BNN, CNBC, and even mainstream metals websites such as www.*****.com), suggests that what we have seen so far is nothing compared to what is to come.

Many here are frustrated at the lack of action in respect of the share price. I wonder how much of this is attributable to the fact that the Vanadium story is still a sleeping giant. Just because we are all on top of the latest technological developments with VRBs, etc, it doesn't mean that the average investor is. Patience is key...