Flow batteries have made strides recently in bringing down costs and improving efficiencies, but they are going to have a tough time competing with the entrenched market leader: lithium-ion batteries.
More than half of the 1,280 MWh of worldwide battery installations on the power grid since 2010 have been li-ion batteries, according to Department of Energy data. Looking at just 2015 and 2016, that share rises to 60%. In the United States, li-ion has an even bigger market share at 78% since 2010 and 97% since 2015.
By comparison, sodium-based batteries comprise about 30% of the worldwide grid storage market and flow batteries just 7%.
But it seems that just about every other week, researchers announce advances they say will make flow batteries cheaper, safer and more competitive when stacked up against li-ion batteries.
Theoretically flow batteries would be the logical choice for utility-scale grid applications. Flow batteries exchange negatively and positively charged fluids to produce electrical current. There is also relatively little degradation of the fluids, giving them longer charge-discharge cycles and longer life spans. They can also be scaled to match growing needs relatively by increasing the amount of fluid in the tanks.
But some of the disadvantages for flow batteries include expensive fluids that are also corrosive or toxic, and the balance of system costs are relatively high along with the parasitic (on-site) load needed to power the pumps.
The market leader in flow battery chemistry is vanadium, but researchers are working on other chemistries to bring down costs and improve the safety and environmental profile of flow batteries.
Just last month, researchers at Harvard University said they had developed an aqueous organic and organometallic redox flow battery that uses a neutral, non-corrosive liquid. And researchers at the universities of Michigan and Utah last month said they have found a way using computer modeling to devise a flow battery anolyte that is 1,000 times more stable than existing compounds.
Researchers are also tweaking less exotic compounds, such as derivatives of a chemical based on vitamin B2, in an effort to improve flow battery chemistry.
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