Inside the Startup That’s Trying to Build a Battery That Lasts Forever

[KamaAina]

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/inside-the-startup-thats-trying-to-build-a-battery-83736221165.html

Imergy Power Systems’ headquarters in an office park in one of Silicon Valley’s less glamorous precincts is the type of place where the future used to be invented. There are no Beats headphones-wearing 20-somethings on scooters. No foosball tables, rooftop beer gardens, or ironically named conference rooms. No birdhouses. Just a sea of drab, blue-gray cubicles. The median employee age appears to be around that of the typical software engineer who files an age-discrimination lawsuit. There are scientists wearing white lab coats. Some have white hair. The chief executive is 61 — that’s 120 in Silicon Valley years....

Imergy has spent years perfecting an energy storage device that, if it lives up to its billing, will help accelerate the big green future by allowing companies and homeowners to pull the plug on their local utility by banking electricity from solar arrays and wind farms for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A 250-kilowatt battery system installed in a 40-foot container, for instance, could store solar energy from the rooftop arrays of a 40-home neighborhood for later use.

This magic box is called a vanadium redox flow battery. The heart of a flow battery are two electrolyte solutions — one positive, one negative — contained in separate tanks. When the solutions are pumped through a power cell containing a membrane, a chemical reaction takes place that generates electricity. When the process is reversed, the electrolyte stores energy....

“Basically, our battery lasts forever,” says Bill Watkins, Imergy’s chief executive and a Valley veteran who served as the CEO of LED lighting startup Bridgelux and before that Seagate, a manufacturer of hard drives (remember those?).

So which oil company is going to buy them out?

[eppur_se_muova]

1. No one's going to buy them out. They're no real threat to anyone.

In terms of power per unit weight, it can't begin to compete with fuel cells or lithium batteries. It will never be used in vehicles or other mobile devices.

The only suitable use for it is the one described -- energy storage for intermittent sources such as wind and solar. And there are several horses in that race already.

[951-Riverside]

2. "This magic box is called a vanadium redox flow battery"

*grumbles* I'm going to write this off as another investment scam/vaporware.

I think they'll pay themselves large salaries, never produce a product then declare bankruptcy.

[NickB79]

3. Batteries are not an energy source, merely an energy storage medium

Due to the laws of thermodynamics, ultimately you will never get as much energy out of a battery as you put into it.

Paired up with a solar or wind system, though, and these would work very well.