Two UK firms have been awarded a share of over £5 million to spur in total on innovation in energy storage. Contracts have been awarded to REDT UK Ltd and Moixa Technology Ltd, as part of the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change’s innovation competition to support energy storage research and demonstration.
Moixa Energy Ltd has developed small battery-based storage units which could be installed in homes to store power and re-use it at times of peak demand.
REDT UK Ltd has developed a technology suitable for storing electricity on the scale of that generated by wind turbines. Its range of vanadium redox flow batteries is based on a design that was first put into practice over 120 years ago, although not yet deployed on any scale, but after 10 years of research REDT has developed a version, designated REDT-ESS that it says is a robust, reliable and low maintenance vanadium storage solution. It has perfected a cell stack design and manufacturing process that increases the quality and lowers the cost of manufacture to a level that makes vanadium redox batteries a practical proposition for a wide variety of applications.
To date they have been demonstrated in applications such as load-levelling the power generated by a wind farm, powering a house using solar energy and in a prototype electric vehicle.
