What’s All The Fuss About Batteries?

Why all the fuss about batteries at the moment? What’s it all about?

The ability to store energy isn’t new, but the technology to store it at household scale and larger, at an affordable price, definitely is. There are a couple of things that make its arrival especially timely.

A growing awareness that current carbon emission policies are short-sighted, coupled with increasing sensitivity to peak load tariffs, all coinciding with the lower cost of photovoltaic (PV) power. And now we have the means to store free clean energy made during sunlight hours, for use later on when the sun doesn’t shine but the meter spins twice as fast. Even buildings without PV installed can use batteries to store cheaper off-peak power, which will offset cost at peak tariff costs.

What’s the real story here? It’s the economics, and the user-friendliness, although household-scale energy storage is such an unfamiliar concept to many people that they assume it is a new concept altogether. It isn’t – we’ve been doing it for decades.

Every farm house which is off-grid – and this isn’t just in the remote outback, but many sites close to cities as well – has been using battery storage since PV became viable in the 1970s. These were usually large banks of massive 2 volt lead-acid batteries connected in series to make up the required voltage, usually 24v or 48v. Inverters were then used to power 240v appliances, though lighting and pumps and sometimes even fridges, usually ran at the battery voltage.

What’s changed all that is lithium-ion battery technology (often known as LiFePO4) – not just the battery itself, but the charge/discharge control device as well. And then Elon Musk came along, and using the Tesla electric car experience, designed it all up into a neat consumer-friendly affordable plug and play package. Tesla has stolen the limelight, but in fact they are not the first or only company to make these devices.

TESLA’S UPCOMING MODEL X, WHICH USES LITHIUM-ION BATTERY TECHNOLOGY FOR ZERO EMISSIONS MOTORING

One or two of Envirotecture’s PV suppliers have in the past installed systems that work in exactly the same way. The difference is these had to be individually designed, specified, parts sourced, checked for compatibility, installed, tested, commissioned, and de-bugged. This is all much more expensive than rolling units off a mass production line.

More recently, companies like Ergon in Qld, and Zen Power in South Australia, have produced large scale systems that are equivalent of plug and play, though often using different battery technologies.

REDFLOW ZBM ZINC-BROMIDE BATTERY CAN STORE AND DELIVER 660kWh OF ELECTRICITY

What Tesla and Zen and others like them have done is the detailed design, testing, and debugging once for all – and packaged it up in a sexy box that even Steve Jobs would be proud of. In fact, they have done for battery storage exactly what Apple did for PCs with the Macintosh.

Manufacturers with similar technologies include Schneider (the parent company of Clipsal), Sunny Boy (makers of some of the best PV inverters on the market), Redflow ZBM (which can provide massive power), Bosch, and even household names like Samsung and Sony.

SMA SUNNYBOY 3600/5000 SMART ENERGY COUPLED INVERTER AND BATTERY PACK

Our friends at Architecture & Design have done an excellent survey of some of the battery technologies as seen in actual products, which are on the market now or coming soon. You can read it here. Thanks to A&D for the images used here.