First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.

With a view to creating a mass market design for vanadium flow batteries, Australia’s Protean Energy will deploy a 4MWh battery energy storage project in South Korea that will be researched over eight years of operation.

The fortunes of Gildemeister’s redox flow battery energy storage have been an interesting mirror to those of the technology class overall in some ways. Energy-Storage.news spoke to a leading representative of those assets’ new owner, CellCube Energy Storage company president, Stefan Schauss.

Long duration energy storage will be put to use in Germany’s grid, with RedT, a UK-headquartered maker of flow energy storage ‘machines’, announcing an initial 80MWh deployment to the country.

Redox flow energy storage systems, earmarked by Navigant Research to be one of the fastest growing electrochemical storage technology sets over the next decade, are being deployed in recent or upcoming projects by Cellcube Energy Storage Systems and Redflow.

As an interactive way to introduce its third generation of stacks, vanadium redox flow storage maker RedT debuted its augmented reality app at Intersolar Europe/ees Europe this year.

Voltstorage, a German company founded in Munich in 2016, is launching a vanadium-redox-flow (VRF) energy storage system aimed at the residential market.

A mining operation in South Africa will start managing the cost of its consumed energy with the deployment of eight flow batteries from Primus Power.

It’s been predicted for some time that the redox flow energy storage space will, after some turmoil and rapid consolidation, find success in providing energy storage at durations of more than four hours. This past couple of weeks have been a tale of both turmoil and success.

Flow battery manufacturer VIZn Energy has confirmed that nearly all its employees have been “furloughed” amid financial difficulties, but denied that the company has exited the business altogether.