In 1984, the University of New South Wales, Australia built a prototype vanadium redox flow-battery. This was the first time there was the same chemical on either side of a flow battery membrane.
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. So what has taken so long?
The battery uses vanadium's ability to exist in a solution in four different oxidation states to make a battery with a single electroactive element instead of two. For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.
They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades.
The researchers found the batteries capable of charging and recharging for as long as 30 years. An employee looks at a vanadium flow battery in Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Battery Reliability Laboratory in 2021. Gary Yang, the lead scientist on the project, said he was excited to see if he could make the batteries outside the lab.
Chlorides of vanadium were generated in 1830 by Nils Gabriel Sefström. He named the new element vanadium after the Germanic goddess of beauty and fertility, Vanadis. The use of vanadium in batteries had been suggested earlier by NASA researchers and by others in 1978, but no one had previously used vanadium redox couples in a working flow battery.
A vanadium / cerium flow battery has also been proposed . VRBs achieve a specific energy of about 20 Wh/kg (72 kJ/kg) of electrolyte. Precipitation inhibitors can increase the density to about 35 Wh/kg (126 kJ/kg), with higher densities possible by controlling the electrolyte temperature.