From Stu Crow's Twitter...

From Stu Crow's Twitter

http://www.northernminer.com/news/sparton-banks-vanadium-vanadium-flow-batteries/1003774456/
Pretty much what most of us already know. But great to see the advantages of Vanadium Flow Batteries being promoted! GLTAH.


In an October 2015 report entitled “The Great Battery Race,” Goldman Sachs describes flow batteries as “the elephant in the room for Li-ion evangelicals,” and states that the primary advantage of flow batteries is “a high number of cycle lives, implying greater utilization and longer lifetimes.”
“Vanadium redox batteries are known for their stability — they can be charged and discharged up to 100,000 times with negligible degradation — and are also differentiated by the ability to discharge almost instantly,” the Goldman report states.

Barker is confident that the emerging vanadium flow battery business will accelerate demand for good sources of vanadium.
“Demand for vanadium is going to go up generally because these batteries are becoming more and more popular and really are a commercial solution to large-scale energy storage,” he says, estimating that up to 20% of all the vanadium produced as early as 2025 is going to be used in the manufacture of vanadium flow batteries, up from about 3% today. Currently there are only about ten significant manufacturers of these batteries worldwide: three in the U.S., three in Europe and four in Asia, he says.
In addition to having a longer life cycle, vanadium flow batteries are not susceptible to overheating and catching fire, like their lithium counterparts, Barker says, and can also be fully recycled, whereas lithium-ion batteries cannot.