A 1.8MWh all-vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) has been installed and powered up at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) test site in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. The energy storage technology will be combined with tidal power generation to provide a continuous supply of green hydrogen at the Idai Orkney facility.
The project was announced back in November 2020, and tidal power is predictable, but its generation curve varies widely between two highs and two lows per day. This makes smooth output from batteries a very important cycling application.
Technology provider Invinity's full-flow batteries are capable of delivering more robust performance and thousands of duty cycles without fading, and projects are currently experimenting with them to see if they're a better fit than lithium-ion, which is believed to have technical limitations in this regard.
The VRFB includes 48 Invinity's VS3 battery modules, which, combined with tidal generators, will power EMEC's 670kW hydrogen electrolyzer. The all-vanadium flow battery system is manufactured at Invinity's Bathgate facility in Scotland.
Also this week, EMEC announced it had been awarded a £454,000 grant for two hydrogen tube trailers, which will facilitate the supply of produced green hydrogen to the Scottish interior.
The site's 2MW tidal turbine, billed as the most powerful tidal turbine of its kind in the world today, has already started generating electricity and will feed into the grid as well as the flow battery-electrolyzer hybrid project. The 74-meter-long turbine was built in Dundee by Orbital Marine Power.
