IEEE Spectrum magazine highlighted another promising energy storage technology for the grid known as the vanadium redox flow battery. Developed in the mid-1980s at the University of South Wales in Sydney, Australia, VRF technology was matured in 2011 by a team at the DoE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State.
Unlike lithium batteries, which store energy in small cells, vanadium redox flow battery batteries store their energy in two tanks of electrolytes separated by an ion exchange membrane. The battery generates a current by converting the chemical energy of the electrolytes into electrical energy; reversing this process allows the battery to charge itself from the electric grid. The requirement to maintain two tanks of electrolytes and related pumping equipment makes VRF technology better suited to utility-scale applications than portable applications.
Jubilee Metals Group Plc (LON:JLP) is a diversified metals recovery company with a focus on reprocessing of historical surface mine waste and materials. The Company has secured surface platinum-bearing tailings to recover PGMs and chromite, lead, zinc and vanadium bearing tailings in Zambia and holds the mining right (granted March 2017) to a primary PGM project in the Eastern Bushveld complex.
