Low Cost Aqueous Redox Flow Batteries Employing Sustainable Organic Anolytes

Redox flow battery (RFB) represents one of the most promising technologies for large-scale stationary energy storage up to MW (power) or MWh (energy) and has attracted increasingly popularity among academic and industrial research groups. There are many attractive technic advantages of RFB including decoupling of energy storage and power output, exceptional design flexibility, excellent scalability and modularity, long service life, high efficiency, etc. These technic merits make RFB a well-suitable choice to stabilize the power grid and overcome the intermittency of renewable energy sources (e.g. solar, wind, and hydroelectricity). We have recently identified a class of sustainable and low cost redox active organic anolytes for aquesous RFBs. In this presentation, we will report our progress on the electrochemical studies of the novel organic anolytes and their flow cell performance in combination with low cost catholytes, e.g. FeCl₂. ARFBs employing low cost anolytes and catholytes hold promise in replacement of traditional vanadium aqueous RFB (VRFB), which is limited for wide implementation by the low abundance and high cost of vanadium precursors.

Acknowledgment

We acknowledge financial support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE) (under Contract No. 57558). Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy.