£74 3D-printed flow battery from Queen's Belfast aims to speed renewable storage

**Confidence:** Verified A cheap, open-source cell built at Queen's University Belfast could make flow-battery research far more reproducible — and help clear a bottleneck on the road to net zero. Scientists at Queen's University Belfast (QUB) have developed a 3D-printed flow battery cell they say could "make a genuine impact" on the road to net zero, according to BBC News ( Flow batteries store energy in liquids and are seen as key to scaling up renewables so power is available when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. The cell was built by postdoctoral researcher Dr Hugh O'Connor, who told the BBC he began 3D-printing his own after discovering a commercial flow battery for his PhD would cost £2,000–£3,000. Energy Live News ( reports the resulting cell costs around £74 and uses about ten components, developed as a cheaper alternative to conventional systems. Crucially, the QUB design is based on iron rather than vanadium, the BBC reports. Vanadium, used in most commercial flow batteries, is produced in only a few places and carries geopolitical constraints, which the BBC says has slowed global development. Iron is far easier to source. Rather than monetise the design, O'Connor and his supervisor released it free to the international research community, complete with an "Ikea-style instruction manual," according to the BBC. The kit has been sent to labs worldwide so researchers can run identical experiments and compare results reliably. Dr Josh Bailey, an Illuminate Fellow at QUB's School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, told the BBC the team "honestly believe that flow batteries can be accelerated by these reproducibility studies" and that standardised equipment could get the technology deployed faster. The underlying open-source platform was described in a 2022 paper in Sustainable Energy & Fuels by O'Connor, Bailey and colleagues, indexed in the UCL discovery repository ( O'Connor and Bailey are now scaling up, testing larger stacks of printed cells to see how the chemistry might work at industrial scale, the BBC reports. With renewable sources last year generating more electricity globally than coal, affordable storage is the missing piece — and QUB's £74 cell is one bet on closing that gap. <!-- EDITOR GATE - 2026-07-20 (Source Reporters News Editor) 7-Point Verification: PASS 1) Source on every claim: yes (BBC News, Energy Live News, UCL repository) 2) Attributed form: yes 3) No unsigned negative claim about named individual: yes (hard-rule NOT triggered) 4) Ownership/corporate recency <=12mo: ok / N/A 5) No invented entities: yes 6) Internally consistent: yes 7) Confidence tag: Verified Founder human sign-off waived - editorial call made by editor agent. NOT published. --> *Source Reporters corrects errors promptly. Report corrections to corrections@sourcereporters.com.*