Can Vanadium Lead New Energy?

VRB (Vanadium Redox Flow Battery) is the world's largest, most technologically advanced and most industrialized, highly efficient and reversible fuel cell, with a series of unique features such as high power, large capacity, high efficiency, low cost, long life, and environmental protection. Advantages: It has very good application prospects in a wide range of fields such as wind power generation, photovoltaic power generation, power grid peaking, distribution power plants, power storage, traffic municipality, communication base stations, and UPS power supply, in Japan, Canada, the United States, Australia, Western Europe, etc. Countries and regions have begun to replace lead-acid batteries with small capacity, short life, and large pollution.

With the rapid development of vanadium battery technology, vanadium batteries will bring an unprecedented, significant and far-reaching new energy industry to humanity.

Vanadium battery advantages Compared with other chemical power sources, vanadium batteries have obvious advantages. The main advantages are as follows:

1. Power: The power of vanadium batteries can be increased by increasing the number of monolithic batteries and the area of ​​the electrodes. Currently, the vanadium batteries used in commercial demonstrations in the United States have reached a power of 6 megawatts.

2. Large capacity: By arbitrarily increasing the volume of the electrolyte, the power of the vanadium battery can be arbitrarily increased and can reach more than kWh. By increasing the concentration of the electrolyte, the power of the vanadium battery can be multiplied.

3. High efficiency: As the vanadium battery electrode high catalytic activity, and positive and negative electrode active materials are stored in the positive and negative electrode electrolyte storage tank, to avoid the positive and negative electrode active material self-discharge consumption, vanadium battery charge and discharge energy conversion efficiency Up to 75% more than 45% of lead-acid batteries.

4. Long life: Since the positive and negative electrode active materials of vanadium batteries exist only in the positive and negative electrolytes, there is no change in the phase that other batteries often have during charging and discharging, and deep discharge can be performed without damaging the battery. The battery has a long service life. At present, the vanadium battery module with the longest running time of commercial demonstration of VRBPowerSystems in Canada has been operating normally for more than 9 years, and the charge and discharge cycle life is more than 18,000 times, which is far higher than 1000 times of fixed lead-acid battery.

5. Fast response: The vanadium battery pack is fully charged with electrolyte and can be started instantaneously. In the course of operation, the charge/discharge status switch takes only 0.02 seconds and the response speed is 1 millisecond.

6. Instant charge: Instantaneous charging of the vanadium battery can be achieved by replacing the electrolyte.

7. High safety: Vanadium batteries have no potential for explosion or fire hazard. Even if the positive and negative electrolytes are mixed, there is no danger, but the temperature of the electrolyte slightly increases.

8. Low cost: In addition to ion-exchange membranes, vanadium battery components are mostly cheap carbon materials and engineering plastics. They are rich in material sources and easy to recycle. They do not require noble metals as electrode catalysts and have low costs.

9. The vanadium battery has a large degree of freedom in site selection and can be fully enclosed and operated without pollution, easy to maintain, and low in operating costs.

Prospects of vanadium battery market China and the world's vanadium battery market are shown in Table 1 and Table 2, respectively. The market demand for vanadium batteries for wind power generation and photovoltaic power generation is calculated as 25% of the total installed capacity (see Table 3 to 6), and other areas of vanadium batteries The market demand is calculated as 100%; the output value of vanadium battery is calculated as 20,000 yuan/kilowatt and does not contain electrolyte.

Wind power generation Currently wind turbines need to be equipped with a lead-acid battery with a power equivalent to approximately 1% of their power. The fans are used to protect the wind blades in case of emergency. In addition, each fan needs to be equipped with a backup power of approximately 4% of its power. Battery. As the power grid has become a bottleneck in the development of wind power, with the explosive development of wind power, the contradiction between wind power and the power grid will become more and more prominent. In order to reduce the impact on the power grid, greatly increase the utilization rate of wind farm power while earning a huge amount of power grid With the difference between the peak and the valley, the wind farm will need to be equipped with a dynamic energy storage battery whose power is equal to 10 to 50% of its power. For fan off-grid power generation, a larger proportion of dynamic energy storage batteries is required.

Because the lead-acid batteries currently used in wind turbines have serious defects such as small capacity, short life span, poor stability, time-consuming and labor-intensive maintenance, and large pollution, the fan manufacturers are always looking for better products that can replace lead-acid batteries. I believe there are many outstanding advantages. The vanadium battery can completely replace the existing lead-acid battery, and then build a dynamic energy storage system for wind farms, greatly improve the efficiency and efficiency of wind farms, and promote the wind power industry to develop better and faster.

Photovoltaic Power Generation According to authoritative statistics, the annual average growth rate of photovoltaic modules in the world has reached 30% in recent years. The photovoltaic industry has become one of the fastest growing emerging industries in the world. In particular, in 2008, the total installed capacity of photovoltaic power generation in the world reached 3 GW.

As the name suggests, photovoltaic power generation requires sunlight. Once it is in the evening and rainy days, it will not be able to generate electricity. Therefore, batteries are required to store electricity. Since the lead-acid battery has very limited power, capacity, and longevity, it is believed that many vanadium batteries have outstanding advantages. Will be the first choice for photovoltaic energy storage batteries.

The main means of peaking the grid for power grids has always been pumped storage power stations. In the past 20 or 30 years, pumped-storage power stations in developed countries have developed faster and faster. The world’s fastest growing pumped storage power station with the largest installed capacity is Japan, followed by the United States, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain. The installed capacity of pumped storage power stations in Japan and the United States has exceeded 20 million kilowatts.

Because the pumped storage power station needs to build two reservoirs, which are subject to geographical restrictions, it is not easy to build in the plain areas, and it has a large area and high maintenance costs. The vanadium battery storage power station is not restricted by geographical conditions, it has a free location, a small footprint and low maintenance costs. It can be expected that with the development of vanadium battery technology, vanadium battery storage power stations will gradually replace pumped storage power stations and play an important role in the peaking of power grids.

Transportation Municipality With the continuous acceleration of the process of urbanization in the world and the continued increase in car ownership, vehicle exhaust pollution has become the number one source of urban air pollution. Vigorously developing energy-saving and environmentally friendly electric vehicles to replace traditional fuel vehicles has become the consensus of the people. With the rapid development of vanadium battery technology, it can be expected that vanadium batteries with many outstanding advantages will be used in a wide range of fields such as electric vehicles (especially urban buses), electric vehicles, electric bicycles, electric ships, traffic signals, and wind-solar hybrid street lamps. Important role.

The communication base station communicates with the base station and the communication room requires a battery as a backup power source, and the time must not be less than 10 hours. For communication operators, safety, stability, reliability, and service life are the most important. In this area, vanadium batteries have innate advantages over lead-acid batteries.

UPS power supply CCID Consulting research shows that in 2007 the UPS market has continued to grow, mainly due to the continuous high-speed development of the Chinese economy, the UPS users demand decentralization, making more industries and more companies to UPS Continual demand. In the next few years, the development direction of UPS products is higher availability, security, and integration, intelligence, and humanization of functions.

At present, China's UPS market strongly demands batteries with large power, safety, stability and reliability. In this field, vanadium batteries have absolute advantages in terms of power, safety, stability, and service life compared to lead-acid batteries.

Distribution Power Stations Today's society is increasingly demanding for the quality, efficiency, environmental protection, and safety and reliability of energy and power supply. Large power grids cannot meet this requirement due to their own shortcomings. With the rise of distributed power stations, large-scale central power stations will gradually decline. It is believed that vanadium batteries will play an important role in **, command and control centers, data processing and communications centers, commercial buildings, entertainment centers, government critical departments, pharmaceutical and chemical materials industries, and distribution plants of precision manufacturing industries.

**Power storage vanadium batteries can also play an important role in the storage of electricity in military bases, command centers and other military departments.