A giant pit in Switzerland will soon house the world’s most powerful redox flow battery

By Abhimanyu Ghoshal – New Atlas

In northern Switzerland, a construction team is hard at work excavating a hole in the ground that will end up being over 88 ft (27 m) deep, and spanning the length of two soccer pitches. This pit will be home to Switzerland’s first redox flow battery for storing clean energy – and it’ll be the most powerful of its kind in the world.

The idea is to utilize a storage technology that’s nearly 150 years old to prevent blackouts, and help stabilize Swiss and European power grids in times of fluctuating demand. It’s being built by Swiss energy company FlexBase, and the project is set to cost over a billion dollars.