“Bon voyage La France!”… straight into the dustbin of history.
It’s at the start of over a century of obscurity. And it isn’t just about La France, as imposing as its visage may be…
What was at its heart is now emerging again, more important than ever.
Let’s take a second to gaze upon something from back when “bigger was always better” though, and we’ll work our way forward.
Behold! La France…
Back in 1884 and into 1885, La France flew roughly 5-mile, or 8-kilometer, circuits over Paris. Puttering along, powered and kept aloft by a 435-kilogram flow battery slung under a huge balloon. Did it five of seven times it took off, even.
It was glorious, no doubt. Defying the sky for all Parisians to see. Carving against the wind itself for the first time.
It’d be nearly two decades before the Wright brothers would stake their dubious claim to the first “heavier than air” flight.
Yet what made the flight of La France work, the “flow battery” at its heart — all 435 kilograms, about half a ton — is not remembered at all in the annals of the early “Age of Flight.”
Why, though? We’ll get to that.
We — the royal we — wouldn’t revisit the power behind La France’s flight in any meaningful way until the “Space Age,” decades later and across the Atlantic.
For a while, the technocracy of NASA was unassailable. In its halcyon Apollo program days it sucked up about 20% of national spending. Now it’s about 0.5%. A steep, long, painful fall.
Kowtow to those that pay the bills. Abandon anything anyone elected to Congress finds unsavory, especially those nuclear-thermal power sources even though they worked so well out in the unfathomable deep, cold of space, decades since they left the ground. Look to energy storage instead of exotic isotopes.
NASA fed grant money and plumbed the depths of any and all universities through the ’70s and ’80s. So much was done to try to find something new. Many of them turned back to the flow batteries.
Yet once again, flow batteries were rejected. And so we once again ask, why?
Batteries have and always will be a burden. A literal one. Use one and you must carry it as well. There is simply no way around it. They bleed, in their way, nonstop. The power they can provide fades. Their very structure degrades on a level we barely understand.
That is the chemist’s and physicist’s domain, and they have made such great strides. La France’s flow batteries depended on zinc-chlorine chemistry. NASA’s final reports in the early 1980s hinged on iron-chromium varieties. Neither were up to snuff.
Now, the third time they’re being considered, flow batteries — specifically vanadium redox flow batteries — have found their place.
A very unique technology from the late 19th century was revisited at the height of spending on space tech in the mid 20th century and is finding its place in the early 21st century. The crux of it all is that they finally are looking good for their charge vs. weight vs. time. Here’s how that looks over a 20-year time frame:
While Elon Musk and plenty of others want to sell billions of batteries of any kind, running in parallel and perpetually on the cusp of self-immolation, in spite of how maladapted they are to the application at hand, vanadium flow batteries are emerging as a top-tier option for anything that should last for any meaningful duration.
It’s a shame we took so long to get the chemistry right, or to put it another way, to support those that were working on it over more than a century. We’ve needed them all along.
Thankfully the smart ones kept plugging away at the problem and got it right. We’re all be better off for it.
