California’s Avalon and the U.K.’s redT are merging their vanadium redox flow battery firms, subject to shareholder approval, to form Invinity Energy Systems. The new firm is valued at $70 million in a deal that the companies have been threatening for months.
The merger was structured as a reverse takeover of listed company Avalon by private company redT on a share-for-share basis, the Greenhouse PR company tasked with announcing the deal told pv magazine. The new business will be headquartered in the U.K. and Canada, added the PR firm.
Flow batteries have minimal degradation, a purported 20- to 25-year lifetime and use a non-flammable, liquid electrolyte. The newly merged company is focused on solar-plus-storage grid-scale projects.
Portfolios and pipelines
Invinity claims a 40-plus global project portfolio and development pipeline that includes a 2 MW battery system for the $49.5 million Energy Superhub Oxford project, due to go live this year that includes a 50 MW lithium-ion battery from Finnish energy company Wärtsilä.
redT joined with Norwegian renewables business Statkraft to offer the first power purchase agreement-based vanadium-flow-plus-solar commercial solution for U.K. businesses. RedT’s vanadium flow systems were also the first of their kind to pre-qualify to offer dynamic firm frequency response services to the U.K. electricity transmission network.
Avalon was founded in 2013 and has deployed more than 160 of its flow battery modules, according to the company. NEXTracker CEO, Dan Shugar, noted the lack of degradation in the Avalon battery at his tracker test facility in Fremont, California.
Long-duration storage always on the cusp of commercialization
Makers of vanadium flow batteries have hoped for mass-commercialization of longer-duration energy storage for twenty years but have never been able to reach volumes of scale. The steep price drop in lithium ion batteries has not helped market penetration for flow batteries, either.
More than 20 flow battery chemistries, including zinc-bromine, zinc-iron, zinc-cerium, and magnesium-vanadium, have been studied — but the most researched and closest to wide commercialization is the vanadium redox flow battery. Vanadium, the dominant cost in that electrolyte, is a metal mined in Russia, China and South Africa with reserves in the U.S. and Canada, and is used predominantly as a steel additive. Flow battery builders include firms such as UET, ViZn, Primus and Sumitomo.
ARPA-E has funded a number of long-duration technologies such as flow batteries, electricity-to-hydrogen, and thermal storage from startups like Antora. Venture capitalists have funded long-duration aspirants such as Form Energy and Quidnet.
Avalon Battery’s president, Matt Harper, was interviewed by pv magazine last year — he said that prices offered by leading flow battery manufacturers have come down 80% in less than five years.
Lazard, an asset manager quoted in the article, calculates that the levelized cost of storing electricity in some redox flow projects now overlaps with that of lithium-ion batteries, the main competition.
Sales of vanadium-flow batteries, the most established flow battery technology, are cited as growing from double digits to just over 200 MWh of installed storage capacity.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
“More than 20 flow battery chemistries, including zinc-bromine, zinc-iron, zinc-cerium, and magnesium-vanadium, have been studied — but the most researched and closest to wide commercialization is the vanadium redox flow battery. Vanadium, the dominant cost in that electrolyte, is a metal mined in Russia, China and South Africa with reserves in the U.S. and Canada, and is used predominantly as a steel additive. Flow battery builders include firms such as UET, ViZn, Primus and Sumitomo.”
From ‘other’ articles published over the last few years, the computer ‘modelling’ has been done at a few institutions and for redox, it will be the economies of scale that will make the difference in creating massive energy storage facilities at or near large generation resources that will make this technology “acceptable” to the electric utility industry. Getting the overall price down from the $1,000/kWh of installed energy storage to a “predicted” $250/kWh of installed storage will be a make or break proposition. A 1 GWh storage facility costing some $250 million installed would out perform a fueled generation resource and could actually be refurbished and upgraded under CIP in perpetuity. Somewhere along the line, it would be O&M costs that would have an effect on energy prices. The same as the lithium ion battery race to get rid of cobalt and even lithium for more readily available elements to make power dense, long lasting batteries is beginning to heat up now. I can see applications where one might have a large regional redox flow battery, with a front end of some kind of molten or lithium ion battery technology for fast response and very long energy storage capacity in one facility.
30-40% of vanadium flow batteries cost comes from vanadium. Even low vanadium prices of today, these companies are not competitive with Li-on. All these companies know this. Yet these articles get published all over the place. Other flow batteries like zinc, organic or sodium slupher, are either un-porven or inferior to vanadium. So really they are all losing to Li-On.
There is not one single significant (50MWh +) vanadium flow project in the last 5 years.
There’s three redox flow battery systems that have been used in small storage system projects. Primus has their energy pod 2.0 using Zn-Br without membrane in a “one pump, one tank” energy storage solution. ESS Inc. is using Fe and FeCL3 with a standard membrane system for their energy storage and UET Inc. is Vanadium redox that signed an agreement with a large Chinese redox flow battery plant Rongke Power in China. The unfortunate part is it will probably be Australia or China that will pull the trigger and construct the mega scale or giga scale redox energy storage system of the future. Don Sadoway’s Ambri has signed an agreement with NEC to use his company’s liquid molten battery technology for large scale energy storage. As far as “There is not one single significant (50MWh +) vanadium flow project in the last 5 years.”, one could say the same thing in 1993 about lithium ion battery technology as opposed to lead/acid battery technology.