“With the vanadium redox flow battery, Stina is putting together the portfolio that we can deliver for the whole value chain in order to bring assets completely as a turn-key solution into the grid system.”
Being a research company for so long, the new Enerox has 19 active patent families, all developed in-house.
The result is a plug & play “cube”, like you see in the picture above. There’s big ones (up to 10 MW) and small ones (100 KW) and customers can put as many of them together as needed—it’s called ‘clustering’—to store as much energy as required. It’s got a small footprint yet it’s very scalable, and what Schauss says that is really important is that it’s flexible for any environment. They have installations in both arctic and desert conditions.
I’m not sure I’ve got across to you how different VRBs are from lithium and cobalt batteries. The energy in a VRB is in liquid form, an electrolyte, and as this fluid goes back forth across a membrane, it loses or gains electrons, generating electricity.
It was developed in the mid-2000s, then trialed and tested in the early years of this decade and has been getting early adopter installations since 2015.
VRBs are discreet, they’re scalable, they last for 20 years with little or no maintenance, they can be recycled to then go another 20 years. They create very green electricity for remote communities — and they let renewable energy be seamlessly integrated into the modern world. So they can be used everywhere.
VRB’s are much bigger in Asia right now than North America. The most notable vanadium-flow battery is probably a 200 MW system being built on the Dalian peninsula in China, which will serve 7 million residents.
Costing $500 million, it’ll be used to peak-shave approximately 8% of Dalian’s expected load by 2020, which means the VRB system will be used in peak usage times instead of building expensive and huge gas-fired “peaker” plants. This battery system will be the world’s largest, and it will single-handedly triple China’s grid-connected battery storage capacity.
Azure International in China says the market projection for VRB demand (by MW) in the top 10 countries is growing at an 80% CAGR from 2013 to 2020, which means there is more than 7,000 MW of vanadium-flow battery capacity needed in 2020.
I want to tell you a couple other quick points about Stina before you go back to your trading day.
1. The public company management team is right now in the process of closing the Enerox CellCube purchase.
2. They also recently bought a power control company in Edmonton that will do $15-25 million in revenue in the next 12 months and internalize a lot of the work Enerox does in North America.
3. Stina actually owns one of the largest, highest grade vanadium deposits in the world, located in Nevada. At some point I can see that getting spun out, giving shareholders two companies for the price of one today.
And that alone could be worth the market cap of the company today, as the price of vanadium is already rising as fast as lithium and cobalt are.
I’ve got a big position here—over 1 million shares and warrants combined—because I see management thinking BIG. They’re buying Enerox for a song just as VRBs and large-scale energy storage hits The Big Time. There’s a huge sales funnel full to the brim, and a large-scale energy storage market that is coming around to meet them head-on.
It’s Perfect Timing.