Pathways to Low Cost Electrochemical Energy Storage: A Comparison of Aqueous and Nonaqueous Flow Batteries

By R. Darling, K. Gallagher, F. Brushett, S. Ha, J. Kowalski. 2014

504 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Energy storage is increasingly seen as a valuable asset for electricity grids composed of high fractions of intermittent sources, such as wind power or, in developing economies, unreliable generation and transmission services. However, the potential of batteries to meet the stringent cost and durability requirements for grid applications is largely unquantified. We investigate electrochemical systems capable of economically storing energy for hours and present an analysis of the relationships among technological performance characteristics, component cost factors, and system price for established and conceptual aqueous and nonaqueous batteries. We identified potential advantages of nonaqueous flow batteries over those based on aqueous electrolytes; however, new challenging constraints burden the nonaqueous approach, including the solubility of the active material in the electrolyte. Requirements in harmony with economically effective energy storage are derived for aqueous and nonaqueous systems. The attributes of flow batteries are compared to those of aqueous and nonaqueous enclosed and hybrid (semi-flow) batteries. Flow batteries are a promising technology for reaching these challenging energy storage targets owing to their independent power and energy scaling, reliance on facile and reversible reactants, and potentially simpler manufacture as compared to established enclosed batteries such as lead–acid or lithium-ion.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e96741dd9c71f231b57b4d12596dd427c22733b6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. Yikai Zeng
2. Lei Wei
3. T. Zhao
4. Xuelong Zhou
5. L. An
6. Y. Chiang

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Yikai Zeng
2. Lei Wei
3. T. Zhao
4. Xuelong Zhou
5. L. An
6. Alán Aspuru-Guzik
7. David G. Kwabi
8. Y. Chiang

Citations in the corpus

• Storage Requirements and Costs of Shaping Renewable Energy Toward Grid Decarbonization (2019, background): “For example, for the most widely studied variant, vanadium redox flow batteries, energy capacity costs have been estimated at z$100/kWh.(36) However, with continued development flow battery costs may decrease.”
• A comparative study of all-vanadium and iron-chromium redox flow batteries for large-scale energy storage (2015, background): “The cost of RFBs is determined by the power and energy part, which can be estimated as follows [33]:”