A very interesting article on Perth based VRFB's and its strong...

A very interesting article on Perth based VRFB's and its strong view that community based VERFB's will be essential in creating enough charging capacity to cope with the expected surge in the EV population.

See AFR article below that was published this morning.
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IPO-bound Thorion Energy targets EV charging, grid firming

Ben PotterSenior writer
Jul 27, 2023 – 7.00am

A Perth-based maker of vanadium redox flow batteries, an alternative technology to the dominant lithium ion type, is counting on its exposure to the market’s preferred themes of electric vehicles and renewables to lift it to a $20 million-plus IPO within a year.

Thorion Energy, formerly known as Ultra Power Systems, is talking to investors about a pre-IPO capital raise of about $3 million. Current shareholders include management and Richmond Vanadium, which owns a Queensland deposit of the metal and is importing vanadium electrolyte while it develops its own resource.

Thorion is aiming to raise $20 million to $25 million and list on the ASX in the next year, co-founder and chairman Bradley Appleyard said.
Mr Appleyard said Thorion has developed a robust version of the vanadium redox flow battery that can outperform lithium ion batteries in two key ways: soaking up solar surpluses that threaten to destabilise the grid; and meeting the huge charging needs of electric vehicles with community-based flow batteries.
Both uses can help transmission and distribution network owners to avoid costly and time-consuming upgrades to their poles and wires, which have become a major stumbling block to the energy transition.

Mr Appleyard said flow batteries are superior to lithium ion batteries in these roles because they can cycle – charge and discharge – more frequently, store more energy, and operate safely at much higher temperatures.

The stumbling block is that they lag lithium ion in commercialisation by a decade. But deployments are picking up in China, Japan, the US and India, where Thorion has partners, and regional WA utility Horizon power is looking at deploying them in remote sites and communities.
Charging an electric vehicle with battery sizes ranging from 40 kilowatt-hours for the Nissan Leaf to 85 kWh for a top of the line Tesla Model S could increase typical household electricity consumption of about 22 kWh as much as fivefold – or tenfold if there are two big EVs in a garage.
“The grid itself is not capable of delivering the amount of power that’s required to charge the EV. So for EVs to take off in Australia it’s almost a redesign of our transmission and grid system, and flow batteries will play a critical role in that,” Mr Appleyard told The Australian Financial Review.
“It prevents the requirement to upgrade transmission lines, which costs billions and billions of dollars and takes at least 10 years to do,” he said. “Batteries are a very viable solution.”

Thorion makes batteries at Bibra Lake, south of Fremantle. It currently imports key components from India – a unique “mixed acid” electrolyte developed by the US Department of Energy that it gets made under licence, and “cell stacks” of membranes through which the electrolyte passes to pick up or shed electrons (charge or discharge).
It adds the tanks, pipes, plumbing, battery management system and housing and assembles the whole to a design that’s the culmination of five or six years of R&D.
“We think we’ve got the model right and produced a very sort of robust first-generation technology,” executive director Paul Hersey says.
Thorion wants to be able to produce every part of the battery, from electrolyte through to the cell stack, the battery management system and so on, in Western Australia, then codify and teach others to replicate the process.

Thorion’s ambitions do not include manufacturing batteries in Australia to export to the world – the economics and cost of transporting heavy vanadium electrolytes make that unviable.

“Our plan is to manufacture here in Australia for Australia, and we don’t have any plans to import products,” Mr Appleyard said. Energy security is “really important, but the plan is to export our know-how to companies that have specific channels to market that we’re seeking”.

Thorion hasn’t had to seek funding or government grants, thanks to support from WA mining executives, who’ve seen its products work at their mines, and Richmond Vanadium. Before the current fundraising talks it had $9.44 million of paid capital, corporate records show.

The company doesn’t reveal turnover, but Mr Hersey said it was up to about 50 module deployments. “It’s still very, very early stage and we’ve only recently gone into full production and manufacturing,” he said.