this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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The article doesn't explain the battery, making it a bullshit site if you ask me, here is what they are talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
'The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery which employs vanadium ions as charge carriers.[5] 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.[6]
For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.[7] '
I don't think I understand any better what the battery is then I did before. As per usual Wikipedia sucks at explaining concepts that you don't actually already understand.
Here's the short version.
A normal battery is a sealed cell. It has a positive and negative electrode, with an electrolyte between them. Usually many layers of this. When you charge it, a chemical change happens. When you discharge it, that chemical change is undone.
A redox flow battery uses fixed electrodes, but a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped and stored. This means you can increase overall storage capacity simply by adding more electrolyte tanks, without needing more electrodes. Think of it like a generator with a bigger gas tank.
The whole vanadium thing is just one of the metals used in the battery. There's a few kind of redox flow batteries using different chemistries
Also there are hundreds of chemical combinations that produce electricity that we know about, and only a handful have been worked on for batteries. As reported in Harper's Magazine many years back, that is not indexed to enshitified search engines, because fuck you (us, google, et al talking.)
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Yeah wikipedia is hit or miss, especially as technical people like to show off their fancy words and explain things in ways only technical people understand.
But it's Vanadium, and you can look that up elsewhere. The first large industrial vanadium battery (if I recall,) was some years back, I think in WA State.
If I really want to feel stupid, I go to the Wikipedia article for some simple maths concept I thought I understood
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Fuck these incompetent headline writers who cant use units correctly. At this point they are doing this shit on purpose to ragebait people into reading the article. And they dont even explain what that headline is supposed to mean in the article. Does the output power ramp up that fast or do they mean that it can actually just output a lot of energy really fast?
I am also fascinated by the measurement “two soccer fields.” Americans largely play soccer on American football fields, so any American would just say “two football fields.” But everyone else hates calling it “soccer” and prefer to use metric rather than comparisons? This just seems like they chose all their measurements to be maximally irritating.
Calling it two football field would still work. Americans would think brown oblong ball field, everyone else would think black and white orb game. In in all cases they'd be thinking of essentially the same measurement.
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Yeah, nobody play soccer in Switzerland, they play football, how would they know how big is soccer field?
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My interpretation is that it can go from no output up to 1.2GW in milliseconds. Do most big batteries take more time to ramp up to high output?
These systems support a latent load so it’s not all at once. Something like this but at a massive scale.
https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva670a/slva670a.pdf
Very cool engineering.
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Actually, the headline isn't wrong, you just read it wrong.
The article specifies:
- 2.1 GWh total storage capacity
- 1.2 GW peak output
- can ramp up to that peak output within milliseconds
Every power source has a ramp up time. Ramping up e.g. a nuclear reactor can take hours, so if demand fluctuates it takes long for it to spin up.
This one here can ramp up almost instantly to cover for fluctuations in the network, especially those caused by the unpredictable nature of renewable power generators.
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn't.
The article specifies:
- Total capacity: 2.1GWh
- Peak output: 1.2GW
- Ramp up time: a few milliseconds
That's what the "within milliseconds" in the title refers to.
Every power generator has a ramp up time. Think the time it takes to start the engine in a diesel generator, until it spins up and is able to output peak power.
Nuclear reactors can hare ramp-up times of hours, in some conditions even days.
This thing here can go from zero to peak output within almost no time, which makes it perfect to balance the sometimes erratic and unpredictable generation fluctuations of renewable energy production.
For comparison, coal or gas power generators usually have large flywheels that, once spinning, react almost instantly to power fluctuations in the network by converting their motion to electricity or the other way round. If these coal or gas generators aren't running, they can't be used to balance the fluctuations in the network, so battery solutions like the one in OP are required to actively manage the network stability.
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Goddammit, they are 0.01 Gigawatt short of time travel. 😋
It says "over 1.2" which means you know what some engineer gave the spec as.
The Swiss are on the frontline of climate change seeing that it is destroying their mountains which in turn are destroying their villages. Sad times.
this will be by far the largest vanadium flow battery in the world, especially outside china
Flow batteries eat lithium batteries on paper and they are so scalable too!
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We don't know soccer fields around these parts...
Anything but the Imperial System huh?
How big is a soccer field?
That'd be 691077 regular sized hamburgers laid next to each other in a rigid grid pattern, 797502 if laid in a hexagonal pattern, 891720 if squished.
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They just had the first stone laying ceremony so that explains the new wave of publications on the project.
They are using a Vanadium flow battery by the company Invinity Energy Systems which is British-Canadian.
I'm a little unsure whether it's a good idea to combine this with a datacenter, I hope the datacenter bubble popping won't jeopardize the whole project.
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