Liquid flow battery technology, due to its unique safety - the use of water-based electrolytes to eliminate the risk of combustion and explosion, is being increasingly valued in applications with extremely high safety requirements. One promising application scenario is the upgrade and transformation of electric vehicle charging services at existing gas stations.



Last week, VFlowTechnologies, a start-up company spun off from the CleanTech laboratory at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, announced that its PowerCube liquid flow battery energy storage system technology will be installed at existing gas stations. The company has announced two demonstration projects, located in South Korea and Australia, to provide electric vehicle charging solutions using all vanadium flow battery energy storage systems. Prior to this, the company had successfully tested the use of liquid flow batteries to build a photovoltaic integrated charging station in Singapore.







The demonstration project in South Korea will install a 150kW/500kWh all vanadium liquid flow system to support intelligent DC fast charging, fully utilizing the existing location and infrastructure of gas stations. The company is in talks with Seoul National University of Science and Technology (Seoul Tech) and the South Korean Energy Technology Group regarding the pilot project. Jae Woo, CEO of Korea Energy Technology Group, said, "The world needs energy storage solutions that can accommodate larger capacities. Flow batteries store energy in storage tanks, which means they have larger storage capacity and are cost-effective because they can be used for up to 25 years. This pilot project can pave the way for a nationwide network of distributed hybrid gas and electric vehicle stations, and compared to other solutions, flow batteries can operate over a wider temperature range and eliminate fire risks."“



Professor YoungIl Lee from SoulTech pointed out that South Korea plans to launch 500000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2025 to support over 1 million electric vehicles. Professor Lee said, "We are collaborating with VFlowTech to install green electric vehicle charging stations at gas stations, ensuring that we can meet future energy needs and achieve fully sustainable energy supply."



The project in Australia is already underway with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of liquid flow battery charging solutions to support the popularization of electric vehicles. This project uses solar powered 5kW/30kWh flow batteries to create an independent charging station, making it replicable anywhere in Australia, especially in remote areas. The project uses VFlowTech's PowerCube technology, and the equipment is provided by VSUNEnergy, a subsidiary of Australian vanadium mining company, which is developing vanadium production and processing technology and electrolyte manufacturing processes in Western Australia.







Patrick Goleman, a parliamentary member from Perth, where the experiment was conducted, said, "Australia lags far behind the rest of the world in terms of the popularization of electric vehicles. This experiment is significant because it eliminates one of the obstacles to Australia's use of electric vehicles - the distance and sustainability between charging stations. Providing a stable renewable energy charging system for electric vehicles will greatly promote the development of the Australian electric vehicle market."



Australia Vanadium has established a subsidiary of VSUN Energy as a means of promoting flow batteries and entering the energy storage market, and has established partnerships with all vanadium flow system manufacturers in other countries, such as E22 headquartered in Spain, CellCube headquartered in Austria, and VFlowTech headquartered in Singapore. Earlier this month, VSUN Energy announced that it had sold an independent power system based on VFlowTech vanadium batteries to customers in rural Western Australia, which would help customers using unstable power grids/sources obtain reliable electricity.



At present, there are also high-speed service area construction companies in China consulting with ZH Energy Storage for an integrated solution of optical storage and charging. With the continuous increase in the market share of electric vehicles, the contradiction of the shortage of electric vehicle charging stations in high-speed service areas is becoming increasingly prominent. It is expected that the liquid flow battery system will be rapidly and widely used in the charging application of high-speed service areas.





Reference:

https://www.energy-storage.news/vanadium-flow-batteries-to-support-ev-charging-on-trial-in-south-korea-australia/



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Author and Company Profile:

Dr. Xie Wei, co-founder and chief scientist of ZH Energy Storage, holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Materials from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has served as a Senior R&D Engineer at United Technologies and Chief R&D Scientist at Form Energy, a startup in Boston. With over ten years of experience in liquid flow battery product development, he was responsible for the all vanadium liquid flow battery project, which won the 2013 US 100 R&D Award.



Relying on the industry experience and outstanding research and development capabilities accumulated by its founder Dr. Xie Wei in the energy storage field, ZH Energy Storage Company will launch mature liquid flow battery products to meet the market demand for large-scale long-term energy storage (discharge time greater than 4 hours) and achieve economic applicability. The company's long-term goal is to build a world leading liquid flow battery technology platform, communicate upstream and downstream industrial chains, reduce the cost of liquid flow battery systems through large-scale production, and become a leading enterprise in the field of long-term energy storage.