Batteries are a bottleneck in the energy transition. They can be expensive, require strict operating conditions, and may pose safety risks. Batteries degrade with time and use. Some chemistries rely on problematic minerals in their supply chains and others are hard to recycle at the end of their useful lives.

Yet, batteries can unlock clean mobility, stabilize electrical networks powered by intermittent renewables, provide backup emergency power, enable off-grid systems, and many other benefits. Many closed-source enterprises are competing to provide solutions in this space, but the commercial path to scale is difficult, with many startups running out of funding before their product hits the market. When they’re in business, there is little transparency or external validation of their development process, and if they go out of business, the wider community learns little from their failures.

We will present our efforts as part of the Flow Battery Research Collective (FBRC) to develop an open-source battery technology for stationary applications. FBRC is developing a battery designed for stationary energy storage use at the residential scale, that aims to be cheaper, safer, longer lasting, more sustainable, and more recyclable than current technologies. We’ll give a quick overview of existing battery technologies and cover the fundamentals of the technology we are working with—flow batteries—and why we picked this technology.

We’ll cover our progress so far, our roadmap, and how we plan to integrate with the many open-source power electronics and battery/energy management systems that exist on the other side of our development gap. Network-connected batteries need secure software/firmware to operate safely; we will go over some ways in which a (flow) battery could be abused if a bad actor were able to control the system remotely. Finally, we will present our personal observations on launching an open-source, mechanical/chemical hardware project and how it aligns with/diverges from conventional open-source software communities.