Cheap, infinitly reusable, can instantly recharge by pouring fresh solution in. What's the down sides to these batteries?
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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The giant battery will be fed with excess energy generated by windmills.
Nice.
This makes the life of the battery practically limitless.
Good.
Plus, it's non-flammable, and almost completely recyclable at the end of its service life.
Great.
capacity of 2.1 GWh, which is estimated to be enough to supply 210,000 households with power for an entire day.
Amazing.
Beyond preventing outages, this one will also be tasked with meeting high demand from AI data centers in the area.
Fuck.
I don't see why anyone would build a AI datacenter in this more populated area of the world, with all the regulations and restrictions in emissions.
Regulations in Switzerland rarely get in the way of making money. Ever heard of UBS?
But the environment is "Folksseele", important to the people. And it was too hot already in April, the glaciers melt away.
Well it looks like the people can get fucked if there’s enough money in it
"We will be able to inject or absorb up to 1.2 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity in a few milliseconds," FlexBase co-founder Marcel Aumer told Swiss public broadcaster RTS earlier this month.
Does this make sense? How the hell do you transfer that much energy in milliseconds? Especially with a battery that requires the flow of liquid?
This article is complete bullshit. What they probably meant is that it can switch between energy input and output within milliseconds, which is realistic. Whoever wrote this lacks a basic understanding of the technology.
From what I read, it does 800 MW max, which is still a lot.
1.2 GWh is just the capacity. And response time can indeed be quite fast as the system is always on standby, but I would guess it would still take a few seconds to go from zero to full power
But with 800 MW it takes an hour and a half to get to 1.2 GWh, and an hour is 3600 seconds or 3600000 ms. So "a few" is doing a lot of work in that quote.
The quote is obviously incorrect, perhaps the engineer meant to say "absorb 1.2 GWh and start providing power to the grid in a matter of milliseconds", and it was lost in translation.
The article was written by someone who doesn't understand the difference between power and energy. It's an extremely common mistake to mix up Watts and Watt-hours, or assume they're the same thing.
If this is some sort of hybrid battery that could be possible... Super capacitors take the initial charge, pass it on to the flow battery. But as far as I know, absorbing or releasing a lot of energy quickly is just not what flow batteries do, it's their biggest limitation.
I mean, you COULD just have a massive membrane area. They won't, cause that'd be crazy, but you could.
True, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of it being a flow battery, I think.
It makes a lot of sense as 800MWh available within ms (especially directly linked to a major grid hub like it is the case here, Laufenburg is famous for it as it's also the point where the swiss and German grids meet) is the wet dream of every grid planer that has to stabilize a network. That is around 12% of the whole average power draw of Switzerland. Which is impressive.
We need more of these.
Switzerland and heavy metal bands both agree to 'open up this fucking pit right now'
Just gotta make sure nobody falls in there.
UNLIMITED POWER
its a kind of "no proove of concept" as it is build by the guys which heavily lobby mini atomic plants
There are various working redux flow large capacity batteries operating already (as mentioned in the article as well), e.g. Daillan, in Japan, this one is just a tad bit larger