GERMAN UTILITY ANNOUNCES PLANS FOR WORLD’S BIGGEST BATTERY
- German utility Ewe Gasspeicher announced plans on June 27 to build what it says could be the biggest battery in the world, to be housed in underground salt caverns off the northern German coast.
- A giant redox flow battery will provide up to 700MWh by the end of 2023, communications officer Dietmar Bücker told BESB, at a cost of around $1,100/MW. The biggest flow battery in existence is believed to be Sumitomo Electric Industries’ flow battery in Japan, which can provide about 60MWh of power.
- While the exact size of the project has yet to be disclosed, the German utility has said it will likely be able to store enough energy to “supply a major city such as Berlin with electricity for an hour.”
- Ewe Gasspeicher's battery, called brine4power, is based on a system developed by the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, which uses saltwater electrolytes with recyclable polymers as the active molecules. Those materials, the team says, are far more environmentally friendly than the heavy metal/sulfuric acid mix that other redox flow electrolytes are often made of.
