the whole industry is booming and Redflows batteries have distinct advantages over lithium. I wont list them all here as they've been stated repeatedly:
Redflows batteries have temperature tolerance, making them better suited to environments such as asia/middle-east/africe/south-america as described
here.
with the rapid development of solar and storage, many regions may never have a fully developed grid and skip that technology generation altogether going straight to distributed generation and storage
grid scale batteries are an interesting technology (at least for me, a renewable-energy-thusiast) but one must wonder if they are outdated before they can reach widespread adoption. While there are key points in grids worldwide where such batteries are now proving themselves to save costs by avoid costly network upgrades by time shifting energy... what happens once residential battery adoption becomes mainstream?
Australia being at the forefront with an expected 1-2m homes having batteries by 2020 may never need significant grid storage infrastructure, which is why grid operators are investing in residential storage and trying to get their slice of that pie. Then there is the rapidly growing and evolving phenomenon of smart energy trading networks which turns hundreds, thousands or even millions of residential batteries into a huge, connected, distributed energy generation, storage and trading network.
This actually puts redflow ahead, given that they have the worlds smallest flow battery and still to my knowledge the only flow battery small enough for the residential market. From that perspective, they have no direct competition - if a residential customer wants a flow battery, Redflow is all there is.
@AOF, I'm not sure if you've been following the RFX forum, so you may not be aware Alan Noble, Googles top engineer in Australia, has chosen Redflows ZCell battery for his home:
http://www.copyright link/technolog...-batteries-a-tick-of-approval-20161017-gs4kdj
For Redflow to succeed, Lithium doesnt have to fail. Lithium is a mature technology and it will see widespread adoption in the energy storage market (despite incidents like Galaxy Note 7...)
In Summary, its unclear whether grid storage will see widespread adoption. The interesting development in my view is the rapid uptake of residential storage, with growth estimates continually being revised upwards. redflow has the only residential flow battery. tick.
(20min delay)