Flow battery progress

[begreen]

Flow battery tech is cool. Kind of like a cross between a fuel cell and a battery. Folks at Harvard are making progress at developing a safe, affordable home battery. Look out Tesla.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-...-flow-battery-commercially-viable-near-future.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/06/21/flow-battery-vs-tesla-battery-smackdown-looming/

 

[woodgeek]

Flow batteries are cool. I am just not sure why they have taken so long to show up.

 

[iamlucky13]

Flow batteries are cool. I am just not sure why they have taken so long to show up.

Lack of a cost-effective application. Flow batteries only make sense at large scales, but batteries are seldom cost-effective at large scales. They're just starting to see real interest for grid stability applications.

At large scales, they're one of the lowest cost battery technologies, but they still effectively add a very large storage cost onto the existing production cost of the electricity they store and deliver back to the grid. The way they are used to keep the grid stable, they can potentially save money, because the traditional method is even more expensive, but for bulk storage of meaningful quantities of energy such as for storing solar energy until night time, it would be the primary consideration.