Sparton Resources, through its majority controlled subsidiary, VanSpar Mining, has executed a contract to finance the commissioning of a large vanadium redox flow batteries. This battery is located in Hebei province, China, approximately 60km north of Beijing, where it was recently installed for the PRC State Grid Company.

With a capacity of 2MW of power and 8MW/hr of energy, the unit was pretested before installation and features 10 units, each of 200 kilowatts power. It is integrated with large solar and wind power installations at the State Grid’s Zhangbei SGCC1 clean energy demonstration project.

“The commissioning programme is the first of a series of transactions being planned by the company, which could result in the company becoming a participant in the manufacturing and sales of large-scale vanadium flow batteries, and, with vertical integration, the mining, processing and marketing of vanadium products,” according to Lee Barker, president of Sparton.

“It is planned to integrate the batteries with green energy power installations (solar and wind) to provide one-stop-shopping solutions for efficient clean electricity production and distribution.

“A convertible debenture financing, of up to $650,000 is being proposed in VanSpar to finance the SGCC1 battery commissioning. A series of payments from the State Grid will be forthcoming once the commissioning is successfully completed and accepted, and will continue over the next three-year period.

“These types of integrated systems can service various industrial and domestic applications including mines, schools and communications terminals. They are cost competitive, long life — over 20 years, and more than 100,000 cycles — they are safe, not prone to overheating and are fully recyclable.”