Lockheed Martin begins testing long duration redox flow battery

US aerospace and advanced technologies giant Lockheed Martin has installed the first commercial product variant of its GridStar Flow, a redox flow battery designed for long-duration, large-capacity energy storage applications.

Already a player in the lithium-ion battery storage sector, having installed over 100MWh of energy storage across the United States and Canada since 2017, Lockheed Martin says its new focus on the long duration GridStar redox flow battery is “based on the principles of coordination chemistry.”

Announced in 2019, GridStar Flow’s new electrochemistry allows for more than six hours of flexible discharge and is estimated to achieve 100% depth-of-discharge with minimal degradation for a design life of 20 years.

Lockheed Martin expect its flow technology to be able to “manage variability for extended periods, capture value across a wide range of time horizons and applications, including renewable energy integration, and evolve with market needs.”

Lockheed Martin announced this week that it has installed the first commercial product variant of its GridStar Flow technology, the GridStar Flow Serial Number One (S/N01) internal asset designed to test the energy storage system’s performance. The installation of S/N01 follows two precommercial prototypes which provided the company with data since incorporated into this first commercial variant.

The 2.5MWh system is projected to discharge at full nominal power of 500kW-AC for five hours, or up to 10 hours at half discharge power.

“S/N01 demonstrates GridStar Flow’s unique chemistry and architecture in a commercial system for the first time,” said Tom Jarvi, GridStar Flow program director.

“This installation marks an important milestone for the program and the initiation of a rigorous test campaign to demonstrate GridStar Flow’s performance, reliability and maintainability for use cases including the effective deployment of clean, renewable energy.”

The development path for Lockheed Martin’s GridStar Flow technology is unclear, with this first commercial variant an in-house project designed for testing. But the company promises that, as tests on S/N01 validate and verify performance, Lockheed Martin “will continue working toward the first customer-sited long-duration energy storage systems.”