History of Flow Batteries

There has been an unprecedented interest in flow batteries over the last ten years, from research to commercialisation and deployment. This is mainly due to increased awareness of the strengths of the technology, namely, the storage of energy over longer periods of time, as well as the need for storage for periods longer than 6 hours that has arisen due to the increasing amounts of renewable energies. The need exists today for stand-alone solutions, and this is increasing each year in electrical grids across the globe. When Kangro proposed flow batteries for renewable energy storage in 1949, there had been little demand for this technology and consequently little interest in it. Nevertheless, many far-sighted researchers, who are hardly known today, have laid the foundation for later important developments. This chapter gives an overview of the historical, mostly, scientific developments of flow batteries.