this will be by far the largest vanadium flow battery in the world, especially outside china
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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The article doesn't explain the battery, making it a bullshit site if you ask me, here is what they are talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
'The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery which employs vanadium ions as charge carriers.[5] The battery uses vanadium's ability to exist in a solution in four different oxidation states to make a battery with a single electroactive element instead of two.[6]
For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.[7] '
I don't think I understand any better what the battery is then I did before. As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don't actually already understand.
source: wikipedia (link above)
As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don’t actually already understand.
but it's true, i have encountered exactly this phenomenon many times :/
Here's the short version.
A normal battery is a sealed cell. It has a positive and negative electrode, with an electrolyte between them. Usually many layers of this. When you charge it, a chemical change happens. When you discharge it, that chemical change is undone.
A redox flow battery uses fixed electrodes, but a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped and stored. This means you can increase overall storage capacity simply by adding more electrolyte tanks, without needing more electrodes. Think of it like a generator with a bigger gas tank.
The whole vanadium thing is just one of the metals used in the battery. There's a few kind of redox flow batteries using different chemistries
Also there are hundreds of chemical combinations that produce electricity that we know about, and only a handful have been worked on for batteries. As reported in Harper's Magazine many years back, that is not indexed to enshitified search engines, because fuck you (us, google, et al talking.)
Fry: I get it! So if the simplified bucket explanation gets full, you just add more buckets!
Yes exactly. If you need more total capacity you add more tanks, if you need more instantaneous output power you add more electrodes. And thus you can scale either one without messing with the other.
Thank you! That is a smart solution to inrease capacity!
The downside is that does batteries are not be energy dense. Perfect for grid storage but useless for car batteries (where the bulk of battery R&D money goes).
Yeah wikipedia is hit or miss, especially as technical people like to show off their fancy words and explain things in ways only technical people understand.
But it's Vanadium, and you can look that up elsewhere. The first large industrial vanadium battery (if I recall,) was some years back, I think in WA State.
If I really want to feel stupid, I go to the Wikipedia article for some simple maths concept I thought I understood
oh yeah, i read up yesterday what a polynomial is. hah.
Yeah I think people who enjoy math and formulas and proofs also enjoy writing Wikipedia articles in the same way. I usually go to the Simple English Wikipedia for any math topics. And I got as far as calc 2 in college, so I'm no ignoramus.
If I heard this on a different situation I would have thought this is an AI hallucination.
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn't.
The article specifies:
- Total capacity: 2.1GWh
- Peak output: 1.2GW
- Ramp up time: a few milliseconds
That's what the "within milliseconds" in the title refers to.
Every power generator has a ramp up time. Think the time it takes to start the engine in a diesel generator, until it spins up and is able to output peak power.
Nuclear reactors can hare ramp-up times of hours, in some conditions even days.
This thing here can go from zero to peak output within almost no time, which makes it perfect to balance the sometimes erratic and unpredictable generation fluctuations of renewable energy production.
For comparison, coal or gas power generators usually have large flywheels that, once spinning, react almost instantly to power fluctuations in the network by converting their motion to electricity or the other way round. If these coal or gas generators aren't running, they can't be used to balance the fluctuations in the network, so battery solutions like the one in OP are required to actively manage the network stability.
Perfect power source for a Death Star! The planet goes from zero to smithereens in milliseconds!
That's like a huge capacitor on my hobby electronics brain.
That's pretty much the job, except a billion times as large.
FYI. Hydro power has similar capacity and start up times
Yeah, the downside of hydro though is that you need to have a fitting space to build it. You can't just excavate a random field somewhere and plonk a hydro dam right there.
In most places all easy spots for hydro are already taken.
Not quite - only the biggest hydro stations can generate a gigawatt or more, and their startup time is like 10 minutes.
This project is only 500 MW here
And other places say 800 MW
Both of which are comparable to large hydro.
Modern pumped hydro has a ramp up in the 10s of seconds range.
Anyway. Same ballpark in terms of power.
I must have got the 1.2GW from some comment.
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I wanted to research it myself since I didn't know how Redbox flow batteries operate. It is two giant tanks of liquid energy. When there's extra electricity from wind or solar, pumps move special vanadium-based liquids through a stack of cells, storing that energy as a chemical change. When electricity is needed later, the process runs in reverse and the liquids generate power for the grid. Unlike lithium batteries, the energy is stored in the liquid tanks, so making the battery bigger is mostly a matter of building larger tanks. The Swiss project will store about 2.1 GWh of energy—enough to help balance renewable power on a massive scale—and was chosen partly because redox-flow batteries are non-flammable, long-lasting, and can be cycled tens of thousands of times with little degradation
I think that's the same kind of battery technology as explained in this video. Most certainly not the same chemistry used, but same in principle
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We don't know soccer fields around these parts...
Anything but the Imperial System huh?
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