Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Sylvia Else Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Vanadium: The metal that may soon be powering your neighbourhood Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 11:51:23 +1000 Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net NksZ/AwUNdCRR2/3+M3IHwZJ1tix3s7jig8Kww7qAo9a+Ofip9 Cancel-Lock: sha1:XIdPHf6oYwSdiCsiUVeaqQWrJwM= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:3695 On 16/06/2014 3:23 AM, Whiskers wrote: > > > For those who aren't impressed by the iron flow battery mentioned > recently. > The Wikipedia article for the vanadium redox battery indicates that you need two atoms of vanadium for each electron. Thus 100g of Vanadium gives approximately 6 * 10^23 electrons, or about 10^5 Coulombs. The open cell potential is about 1 volt, so our 100g of Vanadium gives at most 10^5 Joules. One tonne of Vanadium thus give us 10^9 Joules, or about 280 kWh. The world's known vanadium reserves are about 13 million tonnes. http://vanitec.org/vanadium/vanadium-sources-producers/ So if it were all used in vanadium redox batteries, we'd have a capacity of 13 * 10^6 * 280 kWh, or about 3640 GWh. Wikipedia indicates that the world electricity consumption is 19,320,360,620 MWh per year, or about 53 GWh per day. The point of using the batteries is to balance supply and demand, yet it is clear from the above numbers that the scope for using vanadium redox batteries in this role is going to be very limited if for no other reason than there isn't enough vanadium. Sylvia