“One of the bigger questions for the future is not really
‘Are we going to be able to generate enough energy?’
it’s ‘How are we going to be able to utilize our aging
infrastructure to deliver that energy?’”
— David McShane, International Battery
impaling tests and overcharging tests
and things like.
“Safety is paramount,” McShane
added. “We want to make sure that we
put extremely safe products out in the
field for our customers. We’re proud of
the safety and energy storage performance of our lithium iron phosphate
batteries.
“This means that system design
and packaging for the environment are
more of a challenge than working with
the battery itself. The building block of
the energy storage device is only one
piece. Customers want energy storage
systems; almost 50 percent of the challenge is going from cells to systems,”
McShane said.
Battery’s Role in
Solar, Wind
Energy storage is used for integration
of wind and solar energy into the power
system to make it more dispatchable
as power sources, McShane said. Bat-
teries can level off the variability of wind
and solar energy generation. “Solar has
a prescribed profile. You don’t get any
solar power at night. And you get power
from the wind only when the wind blows.
Figure 3
After the lithium powders are combined into a slurry to coat aluminum and copper material
on both sides, the coated metal is stamped into electrodes. Then the anode, cathode, and
separator sheets are formed into stacks.
Industry Segment
Applications
The company’s energy storage systems
have applications in distributed energy,
buildings, transportation, and the military.
Distributed Energy Storage. International Battery is supplying batteries to
utilities, which install battery systems
at network extremities, or at the local
distribution transformer that serves
four or five homes. This is called community, or distributed, energy storage.
“This presents several power quality
improvements. The battery can absorb
solar energy collected on-site and help
reduce the overall load from the utility.
So, if there were a network outage, that
energy store could keep homeowners
blissfully unaware of a problem for a
