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China Spins Up Giant Battery Built With US-Patented Tech

posted by janrinok on Monday October 03 2022, @10:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-by-with-a-little-help-from-my-friends dept.

upstart writes:

China spins up giant battery built with US-patented tech:

The world's largest vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) has been connected to the grid in Dalian, China, where it was built using technology patented in the United States.

With a current capacity of 100MW/400MWh and plans to double it, the Dalian VRFB will reportedly be able to meet the daily energy needs of 200,000 people, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said. The battery will be used to manage supplies during peak power demand periods, and could allow electricity companies in the Dalian region to adopt more renewables to feed the system.

VRFBs are free of lithium-ion and are far safer than traditional batteries, instead relying on mixtures of liquid electrolytes and acids. VRFBs can hold a charge for far longer than traditional batteries as well, and are also designed to be charged and discharged for decades without degrading.

The Dalian VRFB dwarfs other projects – Australia's largest VRFB only boasts 2MW/8MWh of capacity, and a similar test project in the San Diego area recently stood up a similarly sized battery. Other large VRFB projects are still far smaller, like the Sumitomo battery in Hokkaido, Japan, that was brought online earlier this year. It has a capacity of 17MW/51MWh and was described as one of the world's largest VRFBs.

As reported in August, the VRFB built in Dalian appears to be one designed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) that cost US taxpayers $15 million dollars to develop, and for which the US government owns the patent.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Some call me Tim on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:22AM (3 children)

    by Some call me Tim (5819) on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:22AM (#1274804)

    Did China steal them? Is there a Chinese national working at PNNL that gave them the plans? WTF!

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:49AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:49AM (#1274815) Journal

    Did China steal them? Is there a Chinese national working at PNNL that gave them the plans? WTF!

    Chill. Or ask those journos to give back the money you paid for the news, they misled you.

    https://www.energy-storage.news/discovery-and-invention-how-the-vanadium-flow-battery-story-began/ [energy-storage.news]

    It's an old Australian invention.

    The first vanadium flow battery patent was filed in 1986 from the UNSW and the first large-scale implementation of the technology was by Mitsubishi Electric Industries and Kashima-Kita Electric Power Corporation in 1995, with a 200kW / 800kWh system installed to perform load-levelling at a power station in Japan.

    It requires vanadium oxide dissolved in concentrated sulfuric acid, you can forget installing one into your backyard (hint:it's a flow battery, has moving parts, it's not quite maintenance free)

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday October 04 2022, @04:44AM

      by driverless (4770) on Tuesday October 04 2022, @04:44AM (#1274820)

      It's even more complex than that, half the planet has been working on VRFB tech, and every other imaginable battery tech, for decades. This is just the US getting butthurt because China actually did something while the US sat there squabbling and bickering, then cherry-picking one of a bazillion random patents on the tech that happened to be held by a US entity and claimed those evil Chinese stole it from them.

      I'm not from the US or China so have no skin in the game apart from thinking that if you choose to wilfully ignore a technology then you shouldn't whine about it if someone else does something with it.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday October 04 2022, @06:07PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday October 04 2022, @06:07PM (#1274894) Journal

    I appears China licensed the technology properly:

    PNNL's recipe isn't being manufactured anywhere in the US, and through a series of moves ended up in the hands of Dalian Rongke Power Co. Ltd, which stepped in when PNNL's lead VRFB scientist Gary Yang claimed to not be able to find a US company to invest in the technology's production.

    Yang granted a sublicense to Rongke to manufacture PNNL VRFBs in China, which has since been transferred to Dutch company Vanadis Power, which manufactures PNNL's batteries, dubbed ReFlex, in China.