In the 1970s, during an era of energy price shocks, NASA began designing a new type of liquid battery. The iron-chromium redox flow battery contained no corrosive elements and was designed to be easily scalable, so it could store huge amounts of solar energy indefinitely. Several years later, in Australia, a young chemical engineer at UNSW in Sydne. When a commercial district in Trondheim, Norway, recently commissioned battery energy storage, it made an unusual choice. Instead of ordering lithium-ion, it went with VRFB. One of the main reasons for this was the lower cost, said Besart Olluri, co-founder of the Norwegian company that installed the battery, Bryte Batteries. Another related reason. To understand why VRFB have been getting this attention, we need to quickly brush up on how batteries work. A battery is a device that stores chemical energy and converts it to electrical energy. It does this through chemical reactions that create a flow of electrons from one material to another. This flow or "electric current" is what we call elec. VRFB are less energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries, meaning they're generally too big and heavy to be useful for applications like phones, cars and home energy storage. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, they also have moving parts: the pumps that produce the flow of electrolyte solution. And although vanadium is more abundant than lithium, it's expe. The National Electricity Market (which suppliesthe grid for most of the country, except WA and the NT) has about 1.5GW of batteries and pumped hydro. By 2050, the Australian Energy Market Operator says, it'll need about about 46GW/640GWh. By comparison, the Victorian Big Battery is 300MW/450MWh. So the need for storage is roughly equivalent to addi.
