Skip Technology Inc is developing a novel flow battery for storing large quantities of electricity. The firm's technology is a cargo sized battery that can economically store electricity until it needs to be used. These batteries will sit between renewable energy production and the utility grid. As electricity is produced, any extra power that isn't used charges up the batteries. When demand overtakes the current supply, the batteries make up the difference. Initial generations of the battery will fit into a standard cargo container and can be used individually or chained together to fit the customer's storage needs. One of the biggest benefits of flow batteries is that the total energy stored is decoupled from the voltage and/or power desired. For example, if you want to use lithium-ion batteries chained together to make a large storage battery, you get to choose the voltage of the system OR the total power stored, but not both. This is because each small cell has a set voltage and chaining them together just adds those voltages, one on top of the other.
Flow batteries, however, can be directly tweaked to the customer's needs. The voltage is determined by the number of charge transfer cells and the energy stored is just a function of how big of liquid storage tanks you wish to include with your battery.
