“The company has substantially curtailed its manufacturing, research and development operations and laid-off or given notice terminating most of its employees. Given its current financial and operational status, the company has ceased accepting new orders,” it stated.

VRB says it will still seek offers for a possible sale, as well as look for ways to license its core technology and patents, but in the meantime it is forced to dispose of its remaining inventory and other redundant assets. “In the event the company is unable to make adequate arrangements to discharge its outstanding liabilities, or for other reasons, it may need to consider seeking other remedies under applicable corporate or insolvency legislation.”

Given the current economic climate, it’s not surprising. That said, it’s a shame — there were high hopes in the renewable energy community for the potential of vanadium flow batteries as an economical way of storing wind and solar energy and helping relieve bottlenecks on the grid. When VRB announced it was selling a big system to a wind-farm developer in Ireland there was a lot of excitement, but it failed to close that deal. Since then, all the company has seen is a string of dinky sales to one-off pilot projects.

Chances are the assets will be scooped up by some other, better-funded company at a firesale price, and chances are it won’t be a Canadian company doing it. VRB, however, wasn’t the only supplier of this type of flow battery, and of course there are other chemistries out there with similar — or greater — potential. These include zinc-bromide (Premium Power), lithium-ion (A123), and sodium-sulphur (NGK) batteries. Gridpoint, for example, just announced today that it was selected by Xcel Energy to manage the flow of energy between a 1-megawatt sodium-sulphur battery from NGK Insulators and the grid.

So buck up, folks. We’ll get to energy-storage paradise in good enough time. There are other pokers in the fire.

ExRo says its technology can dramatically improve the efficiency of turbines because its unique design allows the generator to adapt more quickly to changing wind conditions and tap a wider range of wind speeds. In addition to my column, you can find more detailed explanation of ExRo’s technology at Greentech Media and Technology Review.

And let’s not forget the potential of hydraulic wind-energy storage, or EEStor’s EESU and its massive potential for storing wind energy. “We’re talking to people very seriously about that,” says EEStor co-founder and CEO Dick Weir.

Oh, and I should also give a brief update on what Thane Heins is doing and its potential benefit to wind-turbine generators. You’ll recall that Heins’ company, Potential Difference Inc., says it has come up with a way to eliminate Back EMF in a generator that acts as a source of magnetic friction and reduces the generator’s efficiency. Eliminate the Back EMF and you get more output from the generator — theoretically. Heins’ has signed (or is close to signing) a licensing agreement with Montreal-based Tesnic Inc., a startup developer of small vertical-axis wind turbines. If Heins’ approach does eliminate the Back EMF, it will allow the turbine to operate at much lower wind speeds because the magnetic resistance will be eliminated. “I don’t have any comment at this point in time… it’s too premature at this time,” said Tesnic founder Horia Nica when contacted by phone.

I’m mentioning all this stuff because I think it’s important to remember that the renewable technologies we see being deployed today aren’t necessarily representative of what we’ll see, say, in 10 years. People seem to appreciate this point more with solar technologies, but not with wind — that is, it’s just a big windmill, right? For all the limitations of wind energy, mostly related to its intermittency, the technology behind it can and will significantly improve. As it does, it will hopefully silence more of the anti-wind folks and inspire electricity system planners who, to date, have approached wind with a skeptical eye.

Then Kennedy throws out this zinger: The company has a $100 million order for its batteries from a Canadian utility, and another $100 million order from Duke Energy.

Wahhhh? I figured he mispoke, that he was exaggerating, and as an advisor confused some facts. After the speech, I sat down with him and asked him about that comment. He seemed a bit taken aback by my interest, but didn’t backtrack. I asked about the Canadian utility, and he confirmed but said he couldn’t name the utility. I asked about Duke, and he confirmed. He stuck to the $100-million figure for each order.

Now, there’s not much known about Premium Power, beyond VantagePoint’s investment. In 2006 the company was awarded a $500,000 grant through a trust overseen by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. The company said at the time it planned to use the money to “scale their stacks into a large-scale Zinc-Flow 9000 system suitable for integration with renewable-energy sources such as wind and PV for load-leveling.”

Now that’s intriguing. Premium Power’s Web site doesn’t mention the Zinc-Flow 9000, and strangely it has removed all past and present press releases from the site. Yet here we have Kennedy, an advisor to Premium Power’s top investor and certainly a man armed with a wealth of knowledge, talking about $200 million worth of energy-storage orders.

Hmmmm… this could  be interesting.

One More Note: Kennedy also said Premium Power’s battery costs “less than” $200 per kilowatt-hour. That compares favorably to sodium-sulfur batteries from companies like Japan’s NGK, which cost about $250 per kilowatt-hour, and vanadium flow batteries from companies like Vancouver-based VRB Power, which cost about $400 per kilowatt-hour. If Premium’s zinc-bromide battery is truly half the price of the VRB battery, then the economics of such storage become much more compelling.

Lancaster won’t go into much detail about this, preferring to wait until it has filed all its patents. But CEO Daniel Kenway says the plan is to take knowledge and expertise in the Alberta oil patch, as well as manufacturing capabilities, and apply them to wind-energy systems. Intriguing. He also says a first project, partly funded by Sustainable Development Technology Canada, will demonstrate a 1-megawatt turbine with a 2-megawatt-hour storage capability. After which the company plans to scale up by “orders of magnitude.” Kenway says two configurations are possible: storage paired to a single turbine, or a larger-scale storage system paired with clusters of turbines. The latter, obviously, would prove more economical because of economies of scale. But he says the single-turbine storage system could prove useful in remote communities that are dependent on diesel generators. 

As Kenway told me in an interview (and this comment wasn’t in the column), “If you choose your components correctly, it turns out it’s possible to store as much as a few hours worth of energy at the side of the turbines. How we do that I would leave as a secret for a little while. But the notion is that in the end all of what we’re using are elements of technology already commonly found in Alberta. It’s not like we’ve discovered some new vanadium cell or some speculative thing. It’s a case of using good engineering principles and novel integration.” The only detail he gave is that the initial stage of the energy storage conversion process has to do with pressurization in a hydraulic circuit. Beyond that, we’re left guessing.

The result is dispatchable wind energy, and the goal is to achieve the same degree of reliability and efficiencies as found with coal or nuclear plants. Kenway says with economies of scale means the cost of the storage would be about 10 per cent of the cost of the turbines, and capital efficiency could reach about 85 per cent. “When you start looking at how much money you spend on the means of energy production, versus how much money you spend on storage, and how you allocate your capital ratios, that interplay (let’s you) effectively put most of the grid on renewable energy,” he says.

T. Boone Pickens may be interested in this one. Lancaster is working with the Wind Energy Institute of Canada and the University of Alberta on the SDTC project. One of the most interesting aspects of its planned storage system is the fact that it can be retrofitted to existing turbines or wind farms. In other words, if the company’s system works as planned at the costs forecasted, the tens of thousands of wind turbines already in operation around the world can be coupled with storage.

Now wouldn’t that be wonderful?