In the coming decades, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind will increasingly dominate the conventional power grid. Because those sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy, ensuring a reliable grid—one that can deliver power 24/7—requires some means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and delivering it later when they’re not. And because there can be hours and even days with no wind, for example, some energy storage devices must be able to store a large amount of electricity for a long time.
A promising technology for performing that task is the flow battery, an electrochemical device that can store hundreds of megawatt-hours of energy—enough to keep thousands of homes running for many hours on a single charge. Flow batteries have the potential for long lifetimes and low costs in part due to their unusual design. In the everyday batteries used in phones and electric vehicles, the materials that store the electric charge are solid coatings on the electrodes.
“A flow battery takes those solid-state charge-storage materials, dissolves them in electrolyte solutions, and then pumps the solutions through the electrodes,” says Fikile Brushett, an associate professor of chemical engineering. That design offers many benefits and poses a few challenges.
Ferro-Alloy Resources Ltd (LON:FAR) is developing the giant Balasausqandiq vanadium deposit in Kyzylordinskaya oblast of southern Kazakhstan. The ore at this deposit is unlike that of nearly all other primary vanadium deposits and is capable of being treated by a much lower cost process.
