At the Australian Energy Storage conference held in Adelaide, South Australia on May 23-24 2018, I delivered this keynote address about the role of flow batteries and other energy storage technologies in the context of building an energy grid with renewable energy in the majority and with “Baseload” generation on the wane.

The core thematic question I posed was this: Is a future grid with large amounts of renewable energy storage necessarily using Lithium-Ion (or other, otherwise conventional) battery systems for the majority of that large scale energy storage – or are there better ways?

A specific underlying aspect of that conversation is about environmental impact – around the notion of ‘environmentally friendly’ energy generation and storage being a notion that must factor in the ultimate environmental impact for each storage technology and not just its up-front cost.

The video below is a recording of my address synchronised to the slide deck that I used.

The standalone slide deck is also available here: Hackett-Keynote-Redflow-AES2018