Simpliphi predicts cobalt-free battery takeover earlier than anticipated

• pv magazine consulted with Catherine Von Burg, CEO of the Californian battery company, to go over why she believes lithium-iron-phosphate is the chemistry of the future.

U.S.-owned analyst Wood Mackenzie last week approximated lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) is poised to overtake lithium-manganese-cobalt-oxide (NMC) as the leading stationary storage chemistry by 2030. While that is an ambitious prediction in its very own right, one company, Simpliphi, is aiming to drive the change even sooner.

" There's a really vital element that's also having an influence on the sector that may be tough to evaluate at this point, or to value," Simpliphi CEO Catherine Von Burg told pv magazine. "That pertains to the continuous hazards: fires, surges, and so on that remain to occur as a result of that NMC, due to cobalt-based lithium-ion chemistries."

Von Burg claimed knowledge of cobalt's precarious position in battery chemistry is no current exploration and also actions have been made to reduce its usage as well as damage capacity for virtually a decade. In addition to the risks it brings as a metal, the means the industry obtains its cobalt is frequently less-than-savory too.

" The fact is, that the earliest innovations to lithium-ion were around the cobalt-oxide," stated in charge of the California-based energy storage business. "As the sector progressed, entering into 2011/12 [manufacturers started] including manganese, nickel and also other steels to help counter or reduce the threats that the cobalt basically has. Cobalt is basically toxic as well as dangerous. It has a really dubious supply chain, with child labor, warlord labor and all type of other issues."

Swift changes

As for the chemistry change happening faster than anticipated, Simpliphi has reported 30% greater year-to-date sales for 2020, regardless of the international pandemic, a reality the company attributes to consumers wanting secure, safe back-up power for resiliency and safety and security. There are some rather sizable customers on the listing, as well, with Simpliphi introducing battery storage jobs with energies AEP as well as Pepco this year.

AEP and also Southwestern Electric Power Co set up a demo of cobalt-free, smart energy-storage-plus-solar systems. The demo utilizes Simpliphi 3.8 kWh batteries, inverters and a Heila controller which functions as a battery and energy management system. The resources are regulated by the Heila Edge then aggregated to form a distributed intelligent network that can be made use of by any type of central controller.

With Pepco, Simpliphi collaborate to produce an area microgrid at a brand-new housing development, The Maycroft. The Maycroft Resiliency Center consists of a 70.2 kW rooftop solar array incorporated with a 46 kW/56 kWh battery system that detaches from the grid and also offers power for up to 3 days during an unexpected power outage, according to a press release regarding the job.

New tech

In in between forecasts of an accelerated battery transformation, Von Burg likewise informed pv magazine regarding her company's latest product, the Ampliphi 3.8 kWh battery, which includes an exclusive management system that calculates and also transforms metrics right into algorithms which protect, check, report, regulate, authenticate and balance performance.

" When we went into the marketplace, each and every single among our batteries had a BMS [battery management system] and the user interface was based on voltage contours," claimed the CEO. "In other words, it was smart management interior to the batteries in order to maximize performance. As the marketplace has advanced, and also as we have actually taken part in jobs with utilities, we've seen the demand to have much more connectivity and also knowledge developed right into the BMS, enabling our batteries to do over as well as beyond voltage contours and established factors with inverter cost controller devices to actually have digital information and also interconnectivity with, for instance, microgrid site controllers.

" This Ampliphi battery's BMS is something we've been dealing with for virtually a year. What the battery enables is automated synchronization. You don't have to inform our battery-- whether it's one or 100 of them-- that, on-site, there is an inverter charge controller, it's already been pre-programmed to talk the inverter's language and also it syncs up."