Swiss giant battery developer taps UK tech to feed AI power boom

The Swiss developer of a giant underground battery system beneath a new data centre complex has given a boost to UK battery maker Invinity Energy Systems, as the quest for ways to power the AI boom steps up. Privately held Swiss group FlexBase, which is building the complex at Laufenburg on the German border, selected Invinity for its vanadium flow batteries to provide 1.5 gigawatt-hours of storage. This is equivalent to storing enough electricity to supply about 200,000 typical UK homes for a day, in what is expected to become one of the world’s largest flow battery installations. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, vanadium flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks rather than in the battery cells themselves. The battery system is intended both to smooth volatile electricity demand from AI computing and provide stabilisation services to the grid, reflecting growing efforts by data centres to present themselves as flexible power users rather than a source ...