<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/vanadium-the-silvery-data-centre-storage-metal-that-you-may-never-have-heard-of/>
"Vanadium is a strange and fascinating metal.
It’s hard, ductile and lustrous, transforming from a silvery grey to blue,
yellow, green or purple upon exposure to the open air.
It can block heat and conduct electricity perfectly, defying the normal rule
that materials that support electricity are also good thermal conductors.
And it could be the answer to the expanding, energy-hungry artificial
intelligence infrastructure sector, with data centres rising around Australia’s
major cities.
“It’s exciting – it’s, you know, a big thing at the moment,” the head of the
country’s only pure vanadium play, Graham Arvidson, told
AAP on the sidelines
of the Diggers & Dealers Mining Forum in Western Australia.
“Data centres need a lot of energy.”
Mr Arvidson leads Australian Vanadium Ltd, a listed small-cap company with one
of the largest, highest-grade vanadium-titanium-magnetite deposits in the
world, alongside main market heavyweights China – which produces 60 per cent of
world output – Russia, Brazil and South Africa.
It’s developing a massive vanadium project near Meekatharra in WA’s Murchison
region and using its subsidiary, VSUN Energy, to deploy vanadium flow batteries
for long-duration energy storage.
Vanadium batteries are quite different from better known lithium-ion batteries
used in common household electronics and electric cars, bikes and scooters.
The batteries are water-based, so can’t catch fire like their lithium
counterparts, and offer reliable, stable and long-life solutions for renewable
energy storage and power grid management."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
