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China spins up giant
battery built with US-patented tech
World's largest
VRFB was built with inadvertent help from the Department of Energy
The world's largest vanadium redox flow
battery (VRFB) has been connected to the grid in Dalian, China, where
it was built using technology patented in the United States.
With a current capacity of 100MW/400MWh
and
plans to double it, the Dalian VRFB will reportedly be able to
meet the daily energy needs of 200,000 people, the Chinese Academy of
Sciences (CAS)
said. The battery will be used to manage supplies during peak
power demand periods, and could allow electricity companies in the
Dalian region to adopt more renewables to feed the system.
VRFBs are free of lithium-ion and are far
safer than traditional batteries, instead relying on mixtures of
liquid electrolytes and acids. VRFBs can hold a charge for far longer
than traditional batteries as well, and are also designed to be
charged and discharged for decades without degrading.
The Dalian VRFB dwarfs other projects –
Australia's largest VRFB only boasts 2MW/8MWh of capacity, and a
similar test project in the San Diego area recently stood up a
similarly sized battery. Other large VRFB projects are still far
smaller, like the Sumitomo battery in Hokkaido, Japan, that was
brought online earlier this year. It has a capacity of 17MW/51MWh and
was described as
one of the world's largest VRFBs.
American tax
dollars at work
As reported in August, the VRFB built in
Dalian
appears to be one designed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
(PNNL) that cost US taxpayers $15 million dollars to develop, and for
which the US government owns the patent.
Other VRFBs lack PNNL's special
acid/electrolyte mixture, which the lab said was twice as powerful as
other vanadium formulae and could last 30 years without losing
capacity, hence their far smaller capacities.
PNNL's recipe isn't being manufactured
anywhere in the US, and
through a series of moves ended up in the hands of Dalian Rongke
Power Co. Ltd, which stepped in when PNNL's lead VRFB scientist Gary
Yang claimed to not be able to find a US company to invest in the
technology's production.
Yang granted a sublicense to Rongke to
manufacture PNNL VRFBs in China, which has since been transferred to
Dutch company Vanadis Power, which manufactures PNNL's batteries,
dubbed ReFlex, in China. Vanadis partner Bolong New Materials, also
based in Dalian, is described as the exclusive producer of ReFlex
acid-electrolyte material – the secret sauce cooked up at PNNL.
Earlier this month, US Senators John
Barasso (R-WY and ranking Republican on the Senate Committe on Energy
and Natural Resources) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) sent a letter to the
Department of Energy asking for an investigation into the loss of
PNNL's VRFB technology to China.
Dalian Rongke, the senators said, has
become the largest VRFB manufacturer in the world since acquiring the
US patent. The pair expressed concern that the DoE was overtly
derelict of its duties "and that this case may be emblematic of a
department that routinely and flippantly permits government-funded
technology to be transferred to China." ®
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