Power Shift: The Battery Revolution Has Begun

It was the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, and the lauded American physicist Richard Feynman died. Murphy Brown debuted on U.S. television, while at the cinema, Rain Man battled it out with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Crocodile Dundee II.

The Tesla energy storage facility at the Hornsdale
wind farm, 220 km north of Adelaide, South Australia.

And while it doesn’t have quite such a recognition factor, 1988 was also the year Maria Skyllas-Kazacos, an Australian professor of chemical engineering, obtained a U.S. patent for inventing the vanadium redox battery, or VRB.

VRBs are quite something. Unlike traditional lead-acid batteries of the time, or the lithium-ion wonders of today, they store and convert energy separately. They stockpile electricity as chemical energy in two large tanks filled with electrolytic fluids, which are connected to electrochemical cells.

This allows the amount of electricity stored, and the power discharged, to be handled independently. They can be left unused for long periods with no loss of power; and the electrolyte never catches fire, unlike the more temperamental lithium-ion batteries in smartphones today

Read the story from Medium by Wilson de Silva - “Power Shift: The Battery Revolution Has Begun.”