The University of New South Wales in Australia installed Gildemeister’s CellCube FB 30-130 vanadium-redox-flow energy storage system with a power output of 30 kW and a storage capacity of 130 kWh. It is able to take up surplus energy from a 150 kW photovoltaic system. Additionally, it is used for research at the Australian Energy Research Institute at the school.
The CellCube will work as part of the power demand management system of the Tyree Energy Technology Building and provide energy to emergency lights and the telecommunication infrastructure in case of power outages.
The integration of a vanadium-redox-flow storage system was made possible by the investment of AGL Energy and First Solar, which got a government grant under the Solar Flagship Program in 2012. Part of this money was redistributed to the University of Queensland and the University of New South Wales in order to conduct research on energy storage applications.
One research purpose is a hardware in-the-loop testing system that can be built by using the battery and the real time digital system. This enables the experimental evaluation of various power management algorithms for the vanadium redox battery support of PV plants in the Australian national electricity market.
