vanadium market, page-2

Whilst interesting, these figures don't really tell us anything about how much Vanadium the world needs. A gigawatt hour is a measure of how much energy the battery can supply from fully charged to completely depleted. In 2012 the global electrical energy usage was 20,900 Terawatt hours, so that's 20.9 million gigawatt hours, which would require 104.5 billion tonnes of Vanadium per year to supply. But in reality, Vanadium is not a consumable, as in you put Vanadium in the battery when it is made and it stays there for the entire life of the battery (20-30 years). In operation, batteries would be constantly recharged by local renewable or network supplies. They really only need to be sized to last overnight, during outages, or when the sun isn't shining. So the usage capacity of global battery storage might only need to be, say, 10% of 3 days' global energy usage (because outages and clouds are localised and batteries can feed remote load), which is 17,100 gigawatt hours. The batteries to supply this energy would require 85 million tonnes of Vanadium. That's over 1,000 times the existing global Vanadium production. Obviously these numbers are very, very rough, assume 100% penetration of Vanadium flow batteries as the chosen storage mechanism, and there is also peak capacity (measured in Gigawatts) to consider in design. The actual figure could be an order of magnitude either side, but that's still a truckload or two of Vanadium we'll be needing!!! Fortunately for holders KRC has a 1,000 mine life.