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Flow Batteries
The heart of our technology is novel chemistry for a 20+ year, non-flammable flow battery. Our organic molecules for charge storage are stable in salt water and come from inexpensive, industrial feedstocks. Pairing this novel, non-corrosive chemistry with the powerfully scalable architecture of flow batteries produces a system that is stable, safe, non-flammable, inexpensive in every component, and simple to scale. Designed specifically for a flow battery architecture, our chemistry is built for the largest batteries in the world.
Current batteries are designed for portability, which is irrelevant for the grid.
While batteries such as lithium-ion are optimized for size and weight, flow batteries are optimised for cost and scale.
Lithium-ion batteries rule the grid. The problem is they are not designed for it.
Their air sensitivity means they are manufactured as individual small cells to be wired together. A car battery is actually 7000+ cells. Putting them together adds cost, which means lithium-ion batteries become more expensive the bigger they get. Flow batteries are made to become less expensive per unit of energy the bigger they get.
Flow batteries are big. NASA invented flow batteries in the 1970s, and they are the world’s largest batteries.
The capacity (number of molecules; duration of backup) is decoupled from the power (size of electrodes; wattage), allowing each to be independently sized. This means that the duration and wattage of flow batteries are easily tailored to the application.
Why aren’t flow batteries widespread?
Though the architecture of flow batteries has existed for decades, their vanadium-based chemistry is highly corrosive. This corrosivity leads to extreme costs in every component.
Our mild, salt-water based chemistry enables our batteries to be built from inexpensive, standard industrial equipment.