Are Flow Batteries About to Take Over? A Lab Tour of RedFlow's Zinc Bromine Battery

Join me on this project tour of Redflow's hybrid flow battery facility in Brisbane, Australia.

Energy storage is a huge topic these days as electricity grids are seeing larger and larger proportions coming from variable renewable sources like wind and solar and storage is used to fill the gaps between variable supply and demand. Traditionally, nearly all storage in the electricity grid came through hydroelectric dams, but in recent years the new storage capacity that’s been added has been overwhelmingly lithium-ion batteries. This has occurred in tandem with EVs and their lithium ion batteries also experiencing exponential growth. But if this exponential trend is going to continue, there will be supply chain problems to overcome as there aren’t yet enough mines for several key minerals, like lithium, to fill all the projected demand over coming decades. This is one of the number one objections that I hear from climate pessimists: we don’t have enough critical minerals to make enough lithium ion batteries to support a 100% renewable electricity grid. Now, those arguments are misleading for several reasons, but the main one is that lithium ion batteries aren’t the only electricity storage technology available.
Lithium ion batteries are incredibly appealing for EV applications because they can pack a lot of energy into a small and light package. But for stationary storage, the size and weight don’t really matter. What does matter is cost, especially for longer storage durations of ten hours and more. That’s something that li-ion batteries don’t do particularly well. To double the storage duration of a lithium ion battery you pretty much need to double the cost.
That is not the case for flow batteries, which is the topic of today’s video.
Flow batteries are a type of rechargeable battery that use two chemical components dissolved in liquid electrolyte. The electrolyte is stored in external tanks and pumped through a reaction chamber to produce electricity. The key thing about flow batteries is that is cheap to increase the storage duration, much cheaper than for lithium ion batteries – I’ll explain why later on.
Last year while I was in Brisbane I had a chance to tour a hybrid flow battery manufacturer, Redflow.
In this video we’re going to look at how their batteries work, how they’re tested and how their design has evolved over the years.
I was keen to visit Redflow because while the hype around flow batteries is a pretty recent thing, these guys are no spring chickens. They kicked off pilot studies back in 2010 and by now there are Redflow batteries in over 250 sites. Originally they were just selling single 10kWh batteries for residential and remote sites, for example for communications. And these days they are looking at large modular systems in the tens to hundreds of MWh.

Bookmarks
00:00 Intro
00:50 Redflow
01:12 How does a hybrid flow battery work?
02:10 Anatomy of a Redflow Battery
03:49 Pure vs Hybrid Flow Batteries
04:48 Redflow’s Technology Development
06:26 Recyclability of Redflow’s Batteries
07:15 Applications and Scale Up Plans
09:19 Latest updates from Redflow
09:47 Outro

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