China making big battery push in 2019

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/27/china-making-big-battery-storage-push-in-2019/

Jim Stover, vice president of business development at VRB Energy, tells TechCrunch, “The Chinese government I think in particular is happy to incentivize or call out vanadium like this. They want to push a number of technologies, but there is an awful lot of vanadium resources in China, both from mine sites and from steel slag recovery. They’re trying to seize that as a good and natural fit, they don’t have a lot of lithium. They have a lot of lithium manufacturers but not a lot of lithium itself, or cobalt, or nickel even.”
The China National Development and Reform Commission has issued a call for greater investment in flow batteries and set up programs to develop vast projects comprised of two or more 100MW installations. One such project — a 200MW / 800MWh vanadium energy storage project in Dalian Province — is already under way. Flow batteries potentially have the ability to provide electricity to the grid for longer than the 1 to 4 hours that is common with lithium-ion batteries. They also can support more charge/discharge cycles than lithium-ion batteries leading to longer life and lower total cost.