Jan De Nul and co. pioneering a new type of battery

Dredging group Jan De Nul has put a new type of battery into use in Aalst together with Engie and Equans. They want to investigate whether this can be an alternative to classic lithium ion batteries for large-scale storage.

Since Wednesday, the power from the existing solar panels at Jan De Nul’s head office in Aalst has been stored in a new type of redox flow battery. Over the next four years, the dredging group wants to test, together with energy group Engie and installation company Equans, whether the technology is a better alternative to large-scale power storage. Now containers with lithium ion batteries are used for this, technology that is also found in smartphones and electric cars.

Redox flow batteries have been around since the 1980s, but are still expensive and have rarely been developed commercially until now. The technology uses an electrochemical process in which the liquid vanadium is pumped around in the battery. In Aalst, Jan De Nul and co. to test whether the flow battery is a more suitable alternative for large industrial battery parks, which although it takes up more space, is safer and easier to recycle and which lasts longer without deteriorating the capacity of the battery.

The battery with a storage capacity of 800 kilowatt hours and a power of 300 kilowatts must store the power from the solar panels on Jan De Nul’s roof during the day. This can then be used to supply power in the morning, when the sun is not yet shining, for the carpentry workshop, where the formwork is made for the construction sites, but also for the offices and the forty charging points in the staff car park. “We mainly want to learn from this whether we can also use such batteries in other projects,” says Annelies Verwaeren, facility manager of Jan De Nul.

Where a stationary lithium ion battery lasts 10 to 15 years and its performance systematically declines, the lifespan for redox flow batteries is 20 to 25 years. “We have been doing lab tests for four years now and still see no degradation,” says Luc Goossens, CEO of Engie’s Laborelec research center. ‘Instead of just for a few hours or days, if we further develop the technology for a longer period of time, we may even be able to store energy for several weeks, something that is difficult with current batteries.’

“There are currently few examples in Europe of large-scale projects with redox flow batteries,” says Vincent Verbeke, the new CEO of Engie Belgium. ‘But there are many advantages, such as safety and the possibility of almost completely recycling the components. Moreover, it is easy to scale up the batteries by adding additional modules. Our ambition is to reach 10 gigawatts of batteries worldwide. We will need all the technologies for that.’