China has commissioned the world’s largest flow battery. It is a 100MW, 400MWh vanadium flow battery that offers relatively cheap energy storage without using lithium.
After several years of development by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Asian giant has connected the world’s first advanced 100MW compressed air energy storage system to the grid, which is ready for commercial operation in the city of Zhangjiakou.
The new Zhangjiakou facility will abandon fossil fuels and leverage advances in supercritical heat storage, supercritical heat exchange, high-load compression and expansion technologies to increase system efficiency.
According to the China Energy Storage Alliance, the new facility can store and release up to 400 MWh, with a system design ratio of 70.4%.
This number is huge; Current compressed air systems are only 40-50% efficient and even the two largest Hydrostor CAES systems are only around 60% efficient.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims that the Zhangjiakou plant can supply the local grid with more than 132 GWh of electricity per year.
It will save about 42,000 tons of coal burned in power plants and reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by about 109,000 tons.
The Academy notes that the low cost, long life, safety and efficiency of this design make it “one of the most promising technologies for large-scale energy storage.”