Are Flow Batteries About to Take Over? A Lab Tour of RedFlow’s Zinc Bromine Battery

Join me on this project tour of Redflow’s hybrid flow battery facility in Brisbane, Australia. Energy storage is a huge topic these days as electricity grids are seeing larger and larger proportions coming from variable renewable sources like wind and solar and storage is used to fill the gaps between variable supply and demand. Traditionally, nearly all storage in the electricity grid came through hydroelectric dams, but in recent years the new storage capacity that’s been added has been overwhelmingly lithium-ion batteries. This has occurred in tandem with EVs and their lithium ion batteries also experiencing exponential growth. But if this exponential trend is going to continue, there will be supply chain problems to overcome as there aren’t yet enough mines for several key minerals, like lithium, to fill all the projected demand over coming decades. This is one of the number one objections that I hear from climate pessimists: we don’t have enough critical minerals to make enough lithium ion ba