Bridgetown All-Vanadium Flow Battery EK

Invinity's vanadium flow battery tech at the site, where a 50MWh lithium-ion battery storage system has been in operation for a few months already. Image: Invinity Energy Systems. Flow battery company Invinity Energy Systems, alongside developer Pivot Power, has fully energised the UK's largest flow battery, located in Oxford, England.

LODES will use Invinity's VS3 vanadium flow batteries (VFBs) to store solar and grid energy at times of high generation, releasing it back to the grid during peaks in user demand. Though not as energy dense as lithium-ion batteries, VFBs have minimal degradation in performance over time and are better suited to longer term storage as a result.

All-vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) have emerged as a research hotspot and a future direction of massive energy storage systems due to their advantages of intrinsic safety, long-duration energy storage, long cycle life, and no geographical limitations. However, the challenges around cost constrain the commercial development of flow batteries.

As an important branch of RFBs, all-vanadium RFBs (VRFBs) have become the most commercialized and technologically mature batteries among current RFBs due to their intrinsic safety, no pollution, high energy efficiency, excellent charge and discharge performance, long cycle life, and excellent capacity-power decoupling .

Skyllas-Kazacos et al. developed the all-vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) concept in the 1980s . Over the years, the team has conducted in-depth research and experiments on the reaction mechanism and electrode materials of VRFB, which contributed significantly to the development of VRFB going forward, , .

Currently, commercial vanadium electrolytes are primarily H 2 SO 4 (2.5–3.5 mol/L) solutions dissolving 1.5–2 mol/L vanadium, with energy densities typically around 25 Wh/L, significantly lower than Zn mixed flow batteries, which can achieve energy densities up to 70 Wh/L [10, 20].