Minister says Romania may build redox flow batteries with Lockheed Martin

Minister of energy Sebastian Burduja announced the signing of a Letter of Intent with Lockheed Martin for constructing, in Romania, a redox flow battery plant based on the GridStar Flow.

"It is a cost-effective and efficient technology in the long term, with an operational lifetime of 20 years and which, very importantly, does not depend on critical raw materials and is environmentally friendly", the minister wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday, February 11.

The redox flow technology for batteries is not new and technically relatively simple, but it gained traction amid the need for power storage capacities to match the intermittent power generation of wind and solar energy facilities.

Such batteries can store energy for longer periods compared to the Li-ion batteries but have a lower energy density (meaning they need more space for the tanks with liquid where the chemical components participating in the redox reaction are dissolved). Another advantage of such batteries is that their storage capacity (MWh) and power (MW) can be independently set by the design of the tanks and the reaction device.

(Photo source: Facebook/Sebastian Burduja)