Redflow ZCell batteries for home renewable energy storage | Fully Charged

hello and welcome to another episode of fully charged this time coming from sunny Adelaide in South Australia it's sunny most of the time now this country is an amazing place Australia is a country of incredible contrasts amazing natural resources amazing abundance of potential renewable energy and the government that's currently in power that is I think it's fair to say obsessed with coal they even wave bits of coal at each other in the parliament which is quite bizarre what is happening though with this very negative attitude to renewables from the government in Australia on the ground amongst individuals in their houses there is an enormous uptake of solar as an enormous uptake very importantly of batteries to store that energy when the Sun isn't shining we've all heard of the tesla powerwall i've made a previous episode about it that's lithium-ion batteries in a big pack you stick on the wall now this house behind me has a lot of solar panels and it also has batteries but these batteries are a bit different so some thanks so much for giving me the time to see your amazing setup here I just want to explain to people who that when I first came here a couple years ago I had extreme panel envy okay not only that a lot more sunshine so what are that what is the solar setup on your house here right I set up here there's 38 panels making just the theory just under 10 kilowatts in practice they get just over on a sunny day did you install that first and then go for the batteries or was that what did it all go in at the same time yeah we've had the solar system in since about 2006 and the red flow batteries win in about a year ago have you noticed a big it's been pretty it's been pretty obvious we've we've gone from I guess having knocked about 2/3 of our power bill off originally having knocked off most of the remaining third Wow when we added the batteries you know even twenty years ago that would have been pretty much impossible yeah we're not having a diesel generator in your shed yeah correct that's not really doing and what we have here is effectively an off-grid capable system but it's still on the grid and it still makes sense I leave it on because in summer we still make more power than even the batteries can hold so we continue to export that and it means clearly if as well as there if there's high demand for power in excess of what the batteries can provide you're always there on the grid to use it so there's a lot of Merit there's a bit of a myths that you're going to put in batteries and disconnect from the grid being millicent and go away yeah it's actually much smarter I think to stay on them yeah that gives you a backup power source it gives you I think over the next five years we'll reach the point where people will be paid to be a part of the solution using their batteries not just using the solar panels to provide frequency and voltage stabilization so just wait a little while and people will come along with software to plug into that system to to really make the fact that you're on grid be a very positive part of the process so the batteries are in these cases are those that were they are these enclosures hold oh they're Wow lovely red flow batteries I think I was expecting to of a box with lots of flashing LEDs you know but this is a completely different looking thing right yeah these are these are slow batteries and flow batteries literally means this fluid that slows so these these are tanks that have an electrolyte fluid in them and they flow through here there are pumps that drive it through the electrode so but what's happening now they because it's it's sunny at the moment there's the sunshine hitting your solar panels that's going through like a standard inverter like any solar panels would have and then what happens after that then comes here right right we've got content kilowatts of conventional panels on the roof conventional SMA inverters you can bolt this on to any existing solar system where you can add one at the same time and as you said when the sun shining what happens is a new thing new thing goes on now Sun shines the energy runs your house traditionally the surplus is exported to the grid now the batteries are there as well so now the solar energy runs the house the surface charges the batteries and this and once they are full the surplus surplus if there is that still goes out in a grid over agree right and then then when the Sun sets the reverse happens the system that the inverter system starts using this by preference to using the grid right and so this first yes just like a rainwater tank so so by the fun goes down and then the energy that's gone into these during the day the surplus you weren't using that would have been exported you've hung onto it and now you are driving a house with these until either the Sun comes up or if they get completely depleted then it seamlessly uses the grid for additional energy you're not getting lights flickering on no right no no at all but there is that additional nice thing about having batteries one very common misunderstanding about solar panels if you have a power failure and you just have solar it's useless to you even if the sun is shining right that as soon as you add battery ivory is that because the invertible I've got a power supply from the month solar inverters are designed to synchronize to someone else's power and add to it they never they never sit in isolation but a battery and a battery inverter when they're there they pretend to be a grid you've got power and gas anyway yes so even if the so if the grid fails the battery the battery system simulates the grid and your panels keep working so on a sunny day you become an off-grid system you can actually still be charging the batteries even when even if the grids fail but then so what what capacity do these have right these are 10 kilowatt hours each right and I've got 10 kilowatts of panels on the roof right that in where we live here in Adelaide that means that in a nice summer's day will make about 70 kilowatt hours of energy one way more than the back yeah I'm still yeah and so so some of that runs the house some that takes these two completely full and the rest actually get to exercise because you a house wouldn't use them no no does maybe half there yeah and in winter it's much more balanced in winter I won't necessarily fill these completely in bad weather which means I'll be using a little bit more grid in winter in summer essentially we're not using any grid energy at all because we have such a surplus yeah I'm septic i'm yes Joe I'm jealous again I've got panel envy and kill yeah before there you go yeah so we make about 30 30 ish kilowatt hours on a typical winter's day in about 70 in summer right I make about 25 on the most beautiful cloud to stay in the middle of summer yeah yeah because I mean if you imagine it you know which I like to do it writ large so that's sort of virtually every household in Australia has one of these is completely normal no one ever even mentions it crazy got batteries right like you've got a front door yes like a normal the impact on this country would be absolutely colossal yeah its enormous and there's a couple of big things one is that if there is a wobble in the power system you don't mind anymore which is you're resilient to short losses of power and that's a big thing the other thing is that there are some fear mongering that exists that says that when you put enough solar panels on roofs around the place you're going to drive the whole grid internet negative and make everything unstable and nasty that's potentially true until you add these because these mean that you're absorbing your excess into your own house first this diff substantially decreases how much you export into the grid right that that your solar PV that's what's coming off your roof yeah it goes into the that's the window that's the other batteries actually inverter yep so wait and that's about the house yes correct so that's what the house is using right and at the moment they're actually quite balanced as you can see it a little bit overcast right now the PV is making roughly what the house needs and on the Left you've got energy energy sources and things the grid at the top left that's the grid yep and the batteries at the bottom platen so at the moment there's energy coming from the battery going into the house yet offers only a small amount no just mixing it and a tiny amount is going oh there's a moment there's a tiny about coming from the grid then there's and then a little bit sex what's crime right so the mission the mission of the battery control system here is to not use the grid the mission is to have that number on the grid be zero I'm not important it's not export right and it does the best it can towards that out yeah slow batteries traditionally as you see there you have big tanks and big electrodes and also they just have fluid running down two sides of a membrane that's what the flow becomes rather there's pumps and this flow yeah this has pumps this has tanks that it's quite unusual this beastie is called a zinc bromide hybrid flow battery and it's a hybrid because it doesn't quite act like an ordinary flow battery right this is actually a machine that electroplate zinc onto plastic surfaces in order to store energy and in fact as a machine if you want you can even turn it off and come back months later and turn it on and the energy is still there that's it right and when you remove energy you're actually taking a zinc back off these plastic back up design of these plastic plates so in this in this electrode stack you see a 30 of these and these plates actually have fluid running on the top and the bottom surface right and when you store energy the fluids got is a zinc bromide fluid and the thing comes out of the fluid and gets plated onto this so when it's shown as charged cutting electricity intimacies yeah when it's fluid flows down these little tracks and then flows across that surface and as it flows across if you want to charge you put energy in zinc is pulled out of the solution electrons flow through the layer and the zinc is left behind and that's how you store energy this is the world almost flow that tree right as we talked about flow batteries were traditionally much larger things but we make the world's smallest one and the point about that is you can cook this in a house or in a small office you don't need to have enormous container size devices to do it what can cause lithium to burn is just that it is so energy dense but it's so capable it's a sprinter that's what lithium batteries are good for it's why they're so good in cars especially high-performance ones but what you want in a house or in office is a marathon runner you want something that just runs day-in day-out at a fairly constant kind of energy flow so this aterna the fluid in these batteries bromine is actually used to be used as a fire extinguisher this fluid intrinsically puts fires out right you know if you had a fire you could in principle pour this fluid on to put it out it's a dice the thing is intrinsically fire retardant as an object so it's not going to be the source of the fire and it's not going to amplify one right other thing about these compared to lithium batteries is that this ten kilowatt hour battery doesn't lose capacity with age we're all used to lithium batteries in our cars or in our phones or yet gradually fading ten years from now this 10 kilowatt hour battery will still be delivering 10 kilowatt hours so you don't have to oversize it upfront and have it get better get a bit sad with age so you can actually literally put 10 kilowatt hours in it it would leave it yep and then you can take 10 kilowatt hours out you're not taking slightly less than right that's the other thing there's no reserved capacity in these batteries they go from completely full to 100% empty back these batteries because they are a really little electroplating machine every time you empty them you've actually performed the maintenance cycle you've cleaned all those in copper plates in the act of discharging it yeah and now it's ready to go again it the secret to its long life and now I'm very intrigued about all the electric fibers if we're in Australia it's not exactly cold right exactly well we're inside red floes development labs so then we're testing these batteries we need somewhere to put the energy so these are literally just heaters so we charge will charge the batteries up and then we discharge them through the heaters a constant constant energy output merely to test them the purpose of this lab is is integration testing it's to make sure that we can demonstrate with the equipment we have in the next room that these batteries can be plugged in ezel right in places lithium or lead acid connecting up to the same inverters the same electronics that you were use in a home right to put in any other sort of battery so in terms of cost and installation costs if it is it comparable to an equivalent kilowatt hour look you might leave or if there's more than my metrics a couple of reasons one is its new so we fully expect over the next couple of years for the cost to go down quite right quite substantially because it's taken ten years to develop this to work and to be operative and now the next year's will drive the cost down yeah the other thing though is that it's actually it's got a lower total cost of ownership already right over so it's not it's not like that conversation of that electric car Josef Petra ones people recoil from the initial cost that they don't think about the fact that the total cost of ownership is tiny yeah they get the hang of at the same here because it doesn't lose capacity without a check you don't you you can lose 40% of the capacity of the lithium pack over a decade of using it you lose nothing out of this and it's the fact that you can drive it all everyday and actually drag the value for money out of it we think it's already better value right as the upfront cost lowers as we continue to drive volume up it'll just get even more obviously dude so today like like the lovely cars we like driving around today this is a more expensive device that does a better job yes and that's how you start is you celebrate how good that is and then if the volume goes up the cost that you're making these in sort of 10 just rather than rather than rather than pounds we're making hundreds a month there are hundreds of am i right yeah exactly and the design of this the original design of this was very much the commercial and industrial users where you always have a conversation about total cost of ownership whereas using this conversation having said that when we've launched it in this home version because it's the only home flow battery in the world no one else makes one small have to put in a home in these enclosures we've got people really loving these things because they see their positive attributes and like like the nifty Tesla cars also because they're nifty yes they're nifty and cool Anu yeah and it's the virtuous cycle what gets new technology into the market is that 10% of the population that want to drag the new theater the world and show their friends yeah slightly and as that happens then you start the Rolling Stone and other people start taking out some and what is this is a big container with stickers Armand Pressler the stickers yeah they're lovely ticket so this Robert is what happens when you take sixty of our batteries and climb in one shipping container Wow and the idea here is to reduce enough storage to run the entire office that's behind us Wow so days really this can run the whole office two days Wow I mean it can be able to look inside yeah we can absolutely so these are the same units that you've got in your house yes exactly just lots more exactly - in my house and there's 60 here in this container Wow 30 down each side this is 15 15 another two of them on the other side oh I see so that is very much 60s in there 10 closets 600 it's at 600 kilo hours yes I know that Matt but I know that's that excellent official in the past but 600 kilowatt hour long storage you can draw energy out of this at 200 kilowatts typically 300 kilowatts peak Wow so and the building here behind behind it's only needs about 60 or 70 kilowatt set at peak draw typically so that's with lights computers yes but we've done a very energy-efficient offices about 80 people in here right all in cross multiple multiple company yeah and the idea of this along with the solar panels is it's just like a house - bigger yeah and so this entire facility can run to essentially off-grid it's on it's connected to the greener the surplus can go out yeah but there's enough energy here to run the office for two or three days even if even if there was no kind of no Sun - Wow which they never really is completely here yeah that's really I mean today if you happy I thought just just because defecated really sunny recently yeah the original slow battery concept when flow batteries were invented they were conceived to be this big that has two enormous tanks and one enormous electrode so if it's broke it broke right this is 16 little one so in the same sense that Tesla do in the car lots of little batteries we use lots of these mid sized batteries to store energy time so that's all I've got time for this week I really want to thank Simon Hackett for they've shown me around his amazing office and his wonderful house and the cars pretty impressive to still been amazing thanks for watching do have a look at the patreon link that's though this and obviously please subscribe it's really nice when people subscribe to subscriber numbers of grown up a lot it's great thanks so much for watching and as always we're fully charged if you have been thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 360,648

Rating: 4.9564934 out of 5

Keywords: batteries, redflow, zcell, flow batteries, Australia, Adelaide, solar PV, Fully Charged, electric car, electric vehicles, renewable energy, sustainable development, wind turbines, battery, Robert Llewellyn, Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge, robert llew, renewable energy for home, renewable energy youtube, green energy comment

Id: 4OHstY_kKUY

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/google_academic]

Can't wait to see what options I have when I retire in 10 years to live off grid in the mountains.

[u/jamesargh]

Very cool. Can't wait til I can actually afford one. Hopefully by the time the PFiT on solar runs out I'll have the money. My house has a small room that was used as a wine cellar which also has my solar inverter and main fuse box, it's probably just big enough to fit one of these batteries in.

[u/ExogenBreach]

If these guys chucked in the inverter with the battery like Tesla they'd have a winner.

[u/[deleted]]

Moving parts, tho. = friction = wear = eventual failure