From campus incubation to industry, 15 million new dollars invested in long-term energy storage

At the Asia Clean Energy Summit of Singapore International Energy Week 2026, Nanyang Technological University's Energy Research Institute (ERI@N) and Singapore's local energy storage company VFT signed a cooperation agreement to launch a four-year NTU-VFT joint laboratory with a total investment of S $15 million. The project is supported by Singapore's Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 (RIE 2025) program, which aims to develop large-scale energy storage technologies for clean grids.

VFT was born out of NTU laboratory in 2018, and the core patent technology is derived from the scientific research precipitation of ERI@N team. After completing $20.5 million in commercial financing in 2025, this spin-off company chose to return to its Alma mater to co-build a laboratory, bringing the engineering experience and financial resources accumulated at the industrial end back to the front line of scientific research, realizing the transformation and closure loop from laboratory research and development to market application and back to feed frontier challenges.

The water-based electrolyte eliminates the hidden danger of fire and cracks the pain point of lithium grid connection

The traditional lithium battery densely stores high energy in the solid cell, which is prone to deflagment once the thermal control is out of control. The all-vanadium REDOX flow battery (VRFB) developed by the joint laboratory uses a water-based electrolyte, and its energy is stored entirely in an external tank. Since the liquid itself is not flammable, the fire risk is avoided from the physical mechanism, and the safety redundancy of the large-capacity energy storage station is greatly improved.

In addition to being intrinsically safe, flow batteries also have advantages in capacity expansion. As solar and wind energy are connected to the grid on a large scale, the grid needs long-term storage spanning hours or even days to smooth out power generation fluctuations. Flow batteries do not need to stack expensive electrode modules when expanding capacity, and only need to expand the volume of the external liquid storage tank to extend the power supply time, which is more suitable for grid-level peak filling tasks.

The challenge is no longer just to generate more renewable energy. The power system also needs safe, reliable, and cost-controllable ways to store this energy and release it when generation declines or demand peaks.

Industrial waste vanadium extraction with AI prediction, four years to promote commercial landing

In order to reduce the electricity cost of all-vanadium flow battery, the laboratory has formulated a clear research and development route. The team will optimize the battery stack structure and heat transfer and cooling system to improve the comprehensive efficiency of charging and discharging; At the same time, it focuses on the technology of directly extracting and recovering metal vanadium from industrial waste and by-products to reduce the supply pressure of raw materials and pressure drop manufacturing costs.

For grid operation and maintenance, artificial intelligence scheme is introduced. The team is building a dedicated AI algorithm to monitor the energy storage system 24/7 operation, failure warning and predictive maintenance. This four-year plan will not only verify the engineering prototype and deposit the core patent, but also train the local engineering and technical talents in the direction of long-term energy storage, and accelerate the technology to the actual power grid engineering.