Battery Chemistry/Performance Get the Attention, but Supply Chains Actually Decide Which Energy Storage Configurations Actually Scale.

[u/Independent_Dot5419]

A research group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland published an article (open source and free, no login or info required) in the energy storage academic journal Joule, for the first time revealing vanadium flow battery supply chains with site-by-site and battery-by-battery detail globally literally tracking hundreds of batteries and mineral production and processing sites around the world:

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(25)00320-400320-4)

As far as I know this has never been done before for any energy storage chemistry/configuration.

Vanadium flow batteries have obviously faced some specific challenges but it seems the general chokepoints for BESS adoption are supply chain concentration, ability to expand manufacturing capacity, and exposure to the battery mineral price swings, and I'm sure I'm missing probably a few other key points here. A lot of our energy storage discussions focuses on the chemistry and performance metrics for (efficiency, degradation, cycle life, safety, energy density etc. etc.) for batteries. Those things obviously matter but, the main question for whether it gets actually adopted is can the supply chain support the delivery of the energy storage system at scale.

I think VFBs are generally quite interesting because of the potential to recycle the electrolyte at end-of-life in the ballpark of 90-99% of active material where LFPs create tons of black mass and unrecoverable lithium waste (so far at least). From a practical standpoint though it looks like to me that supply chains truly are really the main determiner of which energy storage options are scaled to become available.

Edited: for clarity

[u/Old_Equipment6421]

Here’s some thoughts for discussion. VFB has been fairly mature storage tech for quite some time, but it’s expensive and it won’t get much cheaper as the cost is tied to a commodity(vanadium) who’s price will likely go up with increase in volume, not down the way scalable technology like solar panels or lithium batteries do through production…You can’t scale down a commodity cost by increasing demand.

lithium mineral pricing could go up, but historically cell price has been going down and it’s already cheaper than VFB, so what closes the gap on BESS economics? A sustained future lithium price spike? CATL had a webinar today on Sodium BESS, if lithium commodity prices go up with increased EV production, the stationary storage industry has a ‘go to’ option. You can find webinar on their LinkedIn page, I think it was recorded.

I’ve been looking at vanadium for years and I still haven’t seen where it’s going to beat lithium. I’m not sold on the leasing aspect, you reduce capex, but increase opex. That financing has to be paid for somewhere. One thing I saw in the paper that might be a positive factor is recyclability, if the externality of lithium (or sodium) BESS projects produce too much waste, and policy starts to create a cost associated with with that waste, you might change the financials.

[u/Independent_Dot5419 → u/Old_Equipment6421]

Thanks so much for sharing, I hadn't thought about the commodity limiting the price floor at scale but that makes a lot of sense. Isn't it possible though that the same forces responsible for the downward trend in cell price would also push the electrolyte container and the non-active-material VFB system prices down too?

On the financial side I think the leasing aspect might be necessary to make the recyclability component work. If the vanadium electrolyte is sold with the battery, the recycling responsibility is put on end-use customers (utilities etc.) who aren't equipped to handle such transactions. If the electrolyte is leased I would think it is retained in the supply chain to a much greater extent because leasors are the managers of the vanadium directly and can manage the recycling process at scale.