Health center secures impressive grant for cost-saving energy upgrade: 'Low-cost, non-flammable, and Made in USA'

The High Desert Regional Health Center in Lancaster, California, will be getting some sizeable energy storage thanks to a $10 million grant from the California Energy Commission.

Flow batteries will be installed there courtesy of Quino Energy, which anticipates will cut the hospital's annual energy costs by a third.

Flow batteries have the benefit of being less expensive to run and less explosive than lithium-ion batteries. Redox flow batteries also hold charges for longer, can go through power cycles without degradation, and are easy to scale up.

Quino's take on flow batteries is special in that it's using a plentiful, non-toxic organic molecule called quinone as an electrolyte, which Quino is deriving from wood and coal tar. Reducing toxicity is a high priority, as traditional redox flow batteries rely on vanadium, which can cause ecological and health damage during maintenance.

Increasing the ability to store energy is vital to combat growing duck curves in areas that are rich in solar production. Grids can be overloaded with electricity midday when solar production is at its peak, and at a deficit in the evenings when demand is high and the sun is down. Battery storage that can hold that much power between those two periods on a daily basis can reduce the need to use polluting sources like coal or gas for power.

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Permitting for Quino's eight megawatt-hour flow battery in Lancaster is expected to begin later this year. Construction proper is expected to start in the fall of 2026, with completion due in early 2027.

"Quino Energy is grateful to the CEC for its support to demonstrate the potential of scalable, reliable organic flow batteries in our home state of California," said Quino CEO Eugene Beh. "Our technology started as an invention at a lab at Harvard and has rapidly grown in scale by leveraging mature flow battery systems that have been proven over decades with vanadium electrolyte.

"Our low-cost, non-flammable, and Made in USA organic electrolyte in place of vanadium will allow flow batteries to dramatically come down in cost to be a serious alternative to lithium-ion batteries."

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