<
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/12/distributed-battery-management-inverters-the-new-frontier-for-life-extended-cost-reduced-batteries/>
"Building on many incredible technological innovations, solar energy is set to
break all-time records with 413 GW expected to be deployed globally in 2023.
Similarly, the stationary battery storage market is expected to grow 26-fold
from the 56 GWh globally deployed at the end of 2021 to 1,432 GWh that
BloombergNEF expects to see cumulatively installed by 2030. Once battery
demand for the electric mobility sector is factored in, the market for
batteries is even larger. As one of the main enabling technologies for
accelerating the adoption of variable renewables, any technological
breakthroughs in battery storage hold vast potential to accelerate the
transition to lower carbon energy systems.
One of the things that has excited me the most over the past eight years is
seeing the evolution in power electronics that electrically connect solar and
battery storage to the grid. The original approach in solar sees solar panels
connected to the grid using central string inverters. However, as the industry
matured, more advanced approaches which provide significant value add were
developed. Companies such as Enphase and SolarEdge revolutionized the sector by
commercializing distributed approaches that placed electronics at each solar
panel, allowing optimization of the system to unlock additional power,
lifetime, and installation flexibility.
Likewise, for batteries, the most common initial setup has used central battery
inverters. This approach is not only suitable stand-alone, but can also be
coupled to solar inverters. As such, it provides flexibility in component
choice but has the downside of combined battery and solar systems being quite
costly and requiring lengthy installation processes. Hybrid inverters are one
approach that has gained traction to improve this by combining the separate
battery and solar inverters into a single, more complex system that integrates
an inverter and a DC-DC converter to connect both battery and solar at shared
sites.
But what if this could be simplified even further by doing away with the
battery inverter completely to unlock additional lifetime, cost savings, and
further performance benefits? This is what several established firms and
high-growth startups are working on. Using more advanced versions of battery
management system electronics, typically a subordinate system supporting
battery safety, they can demonstrably achieve an inverter-less connection to
the grid. Taking a lesson from the additional performance and lifetime
distributed approaches unlocked in solar, essentially these solutions use
distributed control of the batteries within a system in a way that creates
step-wise sine waves directly from the batteries, without the need for an
inverter. The solutions that have been developed and are rapidly being
commercialized fall into two prospective levels: module-level control, and
cell-level control."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
