Wind Power, Flow Batteries and Canada

Tyler Hamilton has a great story in the Star (yes, I'm aware that I'm a few days behind on this) covering the new partnership between an Irish wind energy company (Tapbury) and a Vancouver-based flow battery company (VRB) to produce a whole bunch of power together.

Wind power really has one big problem: it's intermittent. If the wind isn't blowing, we're not getting any juice. One solution is to build a wider infrastructure and shunt power between sources (the wind is always blowing somewhere) but a better solution really is to store the power at the source until it's needed. That's where flow batteries come in.

In this situation, you'd have enough wind to power more resources than you need, so on a windy day, you'd actually be accumulating power in these batteries. On days with no wind though, that excess power can be drained at the same rate at which it was produced, providing a clean, sustainable base load power.

This isn't just another demonstration or pilot project done on a small scale to showcase a technology's market potential. This is a commercial deal, representing one of the largest in terms of coupling an energy storage technology with a wind farm.

How large are we talking? VRB is supplying a storage system that will be able to supply 12 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 1.5 megawatts over eight hours. That's a big battery system — enough to power 300 to 400 homes during a typical workday.

Tyler Hamilton, The Toronto Star

The technology is really neat, and the implications far-reaching. It's just so nice to see a Canadian company reaching out to the world market like this.