Comments by "Tony L" (@tlangdon12) on "Are Flow Batteries About to Take Over? A Lab Tour of RedFlow's Zinc Bromine Battery" video.

  1. They don't rely on metalic elements that are only found in abundance from China. Australia has 20% of the world's Zinc reserves and can extract Bromine from the sea. They also have better tolerance to high temperatures, making them more suited to hot countries.
    2
  2. LiFePo4 batteries are very energy dense. These flow batteries are never going to get small enough or light enough to be used for mobile or portable systems, but for applications where space is not at a premium, they can offer a useful cost savings as they don't rely on any rare elements. Static applications is where they will excel.
    2
  3. These flow batteries should be ideal in your application, but Redflow are not focused on the residential market yet. Their focus is on grid-scale applications, and it is there where the money exists to improve the product to the point where residential customers will be able to buy them and be happy with the. The moving parts should be source of concern - in a grid-scale implementation there is enough redundancy for the failure of a single battery to be of no conseqence, but if the pump fails in a residential application, you are stuck; neither being able to charge nor draw on the power stored in your battery. Perhaps Redflow will develop a high-avalability version of their product with a redundant or hot-swap pump, or perhaps a solid-state pump will become available.
    1
  4. They were hit quite badly by the pandemic.
    1
  5. They are almost certainly too heavy (weight vs. energy density) for mobile applications.
    1
  6. The technology has potential to be very cost effective, so it's good that there are some grid-scale implementations where there will be enough investment put into it to really see if it can live up to its promise. I think it's a bit early to say that it is DoA.
    1
  7.  @eugeneputin1858  Most if the weight of the Redflow battery is water, which can be added by the local distributor once the battery is on site.
    1
  8. It will be while before it scales more cheaply than a Telsa battery.
    1
  9. The prices will fall as they scale up their production, and figure out how to supply the residential market without incurring significant additional costs.
    1
  10.  @worskaas  I'm not aware of the needing maintenance checks on a regular basis. They just need repairing when they go wrong.
    1