Lower Cost and Longer Life Flow Batteries for Grid Scale Energy Storage

Completed

Other Power and Storage Technologies(Energy storage)

Basic and strategic applied research

PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Chemistry)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Chemical Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor NP Brandon
Earth Science and Engineering
Imperial College London

Standard

EPSRC

30 June 2014

29 June 2017

36 months

£940,689

Energy

London

Energy : Energy

Professor NP Brandon, Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London

Dr D Brett, Chemical Engineering, University College London
Prof A Kucernak, Chemistry, Imperial College London
Dr P Shearing, Chemical Engineering, University College London

Project Contact, PV3 Technologies Ltd
Project Contact, EDF Energy
Project Contact, C-Tech Innovation Limited

Flow batteries are a form of electrochemical energy storage in which electrical energy is stored via the generation of a physically separated reductant and oxidant, and electrical energy generated when required by the re-combination of this redox couple. Unlike other forms of electrochemical storage, flow batteries are characterised by the ability to de-couple power and energy, allowing significant cost savings as energy requirements increase, and offering the potential for MW/MWhr scale storage. Considerable progress has been made on this technology recent years, especially within China and the UK, but challenges remain to understand and improve lifetime and performance in the currently used all vanadium approach, and to explore novel approaches which offer significantly reduced cost. This proposal addresses the issue of both cost, performance and lifetime within flow batteries, to develop significantly improved all vanadium systems, and to explore novel approaches

30/10/14