Even though the focus for SRN is selling vanadium into the steel market the strength of the vanadium price will also be greatly impacted by the rapid deployment of commercial scale VRFB's.
The article below announces the largest VRFB to date in the whole of Europe. The VRFB in question is in Spain and is now operational.
Cheers..........D
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Enel Green Power, Mercedes-Benz projects push forward European flow battery efforts
By
Andy Colthorpe
March 21, 2024
Europe
Detail of the Largo VRFB at Enel Green Power Espana’s Son Orlandis PV plant. Image: Enel Green Power via X
What is thought to be the largest vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) at a solar farm in Europe has been switched on by Enel Green Power in Mallorca, Spain.
The 1.1MW/5.5MWh flow battery has been installed at Enel Green Power Espana’s 3.34MWp Son Orlandis solar PV plant in the Mallorcan municipality of Palma. The VRFB was provided by Largo Clean Energy, the recently established downstream arm of primary vanadium producer Largo Resources.
Enel Green Power posted some pictures of the project to X (formerly Twitter) on 18 March with the comment that the plant “paves the way for a sustainable, fossil-free future.”
Meanwhile the renewable energy developer’s parent company, Endesa, posted a
short video of the project to business networking site
LinkedIn yesterday (20 March), alongside comments that the “innovative” project is pioneering for the Spanish market.
Endesa also highlighted some of the technical benefits of VRFB technology, describing the new system as a “high-performance solution with no negative impact on the environment” that was developed in partnership with Largo Clean Energy.
Energy-Storage.news reported on the project in 2021 as it got underway, with the solar PV deployed in the first phase and
the flow battery system in the second. It followed a
partnership formed between Largo and Enel Green Power in August of that year.
Largo Resources said this week that it has signed a letter of intent to form a joint venture (JV) with US-headquartered energy storage solutions provider Stryten Energy, combining Largo’s access to raw materials and electrolyte production capabilities with Stryten’s manufacturing and design.
Last year Stryten inaugurated a VRFB demonstration project in the southern US state of Georgia.
That
20kW/120kWh system is being used by utility Snapping Shoals EMC to test the ability of flow batteries to perform “a wide range of applications such as energy cost control, peak shaving, avoiding curtailment and renewable integration,” according to a Stryten spokesperson who spoke to Energy-Storage.news in August 2023 as the ribbon was cut.
The claim that the Son Orlandis project is the largest flow battery paired with solar PV in Europe certainly rings true, at least for publicly announced projects. A 5MWh VRFB sits at the Energy Superhub project in Oxford, UK, supplied by Invinity Energy Systems for project owner EDF. The Superhub is also notable in that it features
both VRFB and lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technologies at the same site, designed as a ‘hybrid’ for each to perform different, complementary applications.
Elsewhere, Anglo-American flow battery company Invinity has also supplied tech to a much bigger solar-plus-flow battery project in Alberta, Canada, with a share of government-distributed funding to support it.
Chappice Lake Solar & Storage Project features a 2.8MW/8.4MWh VRFB system paired with 21MWp of solar PV.
Meanwhile, the biggest VRFB project of any type in the world is thought to be in Dalian, China. Co-developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a storage capacity of 400MWh to 100MW output, the project is planned for expansion to double both megawatts and megawatt-hours and is one of a number of large-scale projects supported by China’s government.
(20min delay)