​Healthy batteries should main­tain a capacity above 9% of the manufacturer’s rating; most manufacturers recommend replacing the battery if it falls below 80%. A series of regular tests are recommended for ensuring that batteries are maintaining capacity. When conduct­ing battery tests, look for these indicators of failure:

Drop incapacity of more than 10% compared to the baseline or previous measurement
20% or more increase in resistance compared to baseline or previous
Sustained high temperatures, compared to baseline and manufacturer’s specs
Degradation in plate condition
The Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) is the primary source of standard practices for battery maintenance. Over the life of the battery, The IEEE recommends performing a combination of tests periodically as seen in the chart below.
​Advert

Inspections recommended by IEEE 1188 standard “Recommended Practice for Maintenance, Testing and Replacement of Valve-Regulated Lead-Acid (VRLA) Batteries for Stationary Applications”

The IEEE also recommends the following schedule for discharge testing:

An acceptance test made at the manufacturer’s factory or upon initial installation
Periodic discharge testing—at an interval not greater than 25% of the expected service life, or two years, whichever is less
Annual discharge testing—when any battery has reached 85% of the expected service life or dropped >10% from capacity
Since scheduling full-scale discharge testing can be difficult, good regular maintenance is extremely important. By operating the battery according to manufacturer charging requirements and following the IEEE recommendations for battery testing, it should be possible to maximize the life of the battery system.

Contact COMTEST on + 010 595 1821, sales@comtest.co.za or www.comtest.co.za for more information on Fluke battery testing systems, technical or seminar information, demonstrations or to locate your nearest Authorised Comtest Channel Partner.
Source........

Our new member, Eastman Power, is diversifying to service Southern Africa.

"As the world’s leading provider of smart solar energy solutions, Eastman is the active contributor in shaping the solar revolution. We offer world-class and affordable solar solutions even at remote locations making solar energy affordable and available for everyone. We are the largest solar module supplier across the globe and have pushed the Solar industry forward by manufacturing high-efficiency module and comprehensive electronic procurement construction solutions. As you start your solar journey with us, you’ll turn your global footprint into a step towards the clean, green and sustainable future. Driven by a passion for green energy, we have become a name that evokes the spirit of “CLEAN, GREEN AND SERENE”."

Website........
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​Solar panels, batteries, inverters, solar street lights and accessories are available with a global presence committed to best customer experience, no matter the location.

Prospective agents/distributors are welcome to enquire about our services and/or products.

​SAAEA will gladly assist with forging relationships.
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Enquire here>>>>>>>>>
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​Or contact directly   ashish@eastmanglobal.com     anurag.bora@eastmanglobal.com​

The Australian company LAVO has developed a hydrogen storage system for domestic solar systems. It is the world’s first integrated hybrid hydrogen battery that combines with rooftop solar to deliver sustainable, reliable, and renewable green energy to your home and business.

Developed in partnership with UNSW, Sydney, Australia, and Design + Industry, the Hydrogen Battery System from LAVO consists of an electrolysis system, hydrogen storage array, and fuel cell power system rolled into one attractive cabinet. When the electricity from the solar system on the roof is not needed, it is stored in the form of hydrogen. This then serves as fuel for the fuel cell when the solar system is not supplying electricity.

The System is about 1.68 m high, 1.20 m wide, and weighs a meaty 324 kg, making it very unlikely to be pocketed by a thief. The hydrogen is stored in a patented metal hydride sponge at a pressure of 30 bar, or 435 psi.

The storage devices for the home are more like lithium-ion batteries. These include the solar battery from the German company Sonnen, which is offered with capacities between 10 and 50 kWh, or Tesla’s house battery Powerwall, which stores 13.5 kWh.

World's first hybrid hydrogen battery powers your home for three days.
LAVO System Diagram Hydrogen Energy. Credit: LAVO
However, LAVO’s hydrogen hybrid battery delivers a continuous output of 5 kW and stores over 40kWh of electricity – enough to power the average Australian home for two days on a single charge. The system is designed to easily integrate with existing solar panels, creating a significant opportunity for LAVO to have an immediate and notable impact. There are Wi-Fi connectivity and a phone app for monitoring and control, and businesses with higher power needs can run several in parallel to form an intelligent virtual power plant.

Hydrogen is often incorrectly seen as an unsafe fuel, usually due to the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. However, the company says any leaks will disperse quickly, though, making it inherently no more dangerous than other conventional fuels such as gasoline or natural gas. This innovation has a lifespan of approximately 30 years, which is three times longer than that of lithium batteries, thanks to its reliance on hydrogen gas rather than the chemicals in a conventional battery.

According to the manufacturer, LAVO’s hydrogen storage should be ready for installation by the middle of this year. It costs AU$34,750 (US$26,900) for the first 2,500 units and will require a fully refundable deposit to secure your LAVO pre-order. In the coming year, the price is expected to drop to AU$29,450 (US$22,800).

Source ........

By Akshat Rathi, Paul Murray and Rachael Dottle April 27, 2021

​Batteries took over the modern world without changing all that much.

A smartphone, by comparison, has far less in common with the mainframe computers that preceded it. Same goes for the Tesla Model 3 and the Ford Model T. But lithium-ion technology used in today’s batteries has sustained decades of exponential growth—moving from gadgets to electric vehicles, and even spawning a few billionaires along the way—without major changes to its structure since Sony first commercialized the technology in 1991.

That’s not because chemists haven’t tried. It’s just that developing new materials that perform to industrial standards is a very hard problem.

All batteries have four components: two electrodes (anode and cathode), a liquid electrolyte that helps ions move between the electrodes, and a separator to keep the electrodes from coming in direct contact with each other and preventing fires. When a battery is charged, ions flow from the cathode to the anode. When it’s discharged, the ions reverse course.

​Energy is stored in chemical bonds between lithium and the other components. It’s converted into electrical energy when the battery is in use.

Charged lithium atoms move from the anode to the cathode, causing electrons to move externally. That’s what powers a device.
As the world moves to rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions, the race is on to plug more things into ever more powerful batteries: power grids, trucks, ships, and even airplanes. The innerspace of this crucial technology is finally poised to see dramatic changes, with a number of secretive startups promising breakthroughs. QuantumScape Corp. claims to have created a new battery material that would allow electric cars to travel further and charge much faster—and as a result the startup has a valuation that’s ranged between $13 billion and $20 billion in recent weeks, even without any revenue in sight. Its rivals, including giants like Samsung and Panasonic, are also chasing next-generation batteries.

Before we reach the battery future, it’s important to understand the physical evolution of today’s lithium-ion tech. Billions of people experience phones with faster recharging and cars with longer range, but few of us can explain what’s behind these improvements. It’s a story of tweaks: small efficiencies in manufacturing, small improvements in materials, and small gains in performance.

Read more......

As battery power becomes more viable in the quest to green the grid, it’s incumbent on business leaders across industries and continents to share the best practices that will help advance the clean-energy transition.
Thanks to increased R&D spending that has advanced the core science, the cost of lithium-ion batteries is plummeting. Already at record lows, the price of battery power could be halved again by mid-decade, meaning that the math of whether or not it makes economic sense to use battery power will likely soon be settled in the span of just one car-leasing cycle.​
As rare-earth element producers like China and Australia turn to protectionist policies, access to the raw materials that go into batteries is increasingly becoming a geopolitical issue. This may inspire a move to supply chains that are closer to home, along with more investment in emerging markets.

Read more......

The cost of harvesting solar energy has dropped so much in recent years that it's giving traditional energy sources a run for their money. However, the challenges of energy storage -- which require the capacity to bank an intermittent and seasonally variable supply of solar energy -- have kept the technology from being economically competitive.

Cornell University researchers led by Lynden Archer, Dean and Professor of Engineering, have been exploring the use of low-cost materials to create rechargeable batteries that will make energy storage more affordable. Now, they have shown that a new technique incorporating aluminum results in rechargeable batteries that offer up to 10,000 error-free cycles.

This new kind of battery could provide a safer and more environmentally friendly alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which currently dominate the market but are slow to charge and have a knack for catching fire.

The team's paper, "Regulating Electrodeposition Morphology in High-Capacity Aluminium and Zinc Battery Anodes Using Interfacial Metal-Substrate Bonding," published in Nature Energy.

Among the advantages of aluminum is that it is abundant in the earth's crust, it is trivalent and light, and it therefore has a high capacity to store more energy than many other metals. However, aluminum can be tricky to integrate into a battery's electrodes. It reacts chemically with the glass fiber separator, which physically divides the anode and the cathode, causing the battery to short circuit and fail.

The researchers' solution was to design a substrate of interwoven carbon fibers that forms an even stronger chemical bond with aluminum. When the battery is charged, the aluminum is deposited into the carbon structure via covalent bonding, i.e., the sharing of electron pairs between aluminum and carbon atoms.

While electrodes in conventional rechargeable batteries are only two dimensional, this technique uses a three-dimensional -- or nonplanar -- architecture and creates a deeper, more consistent layering of aluminum that can be finely controlled.

The aluminum-anode batteries can be reversibly charged and discharged one or more orders of magnitude more times than other aluminum rechargeable batteries under practical conditions.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by David Nutt. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

South Africans looking to purchase a backup power solution should be careful when considering suitable batteries.
The prevalence of load-shedding has led many to resort to battery-inverter systems that are able to charge when the power is on and then provide stored electricity for use during power cuts.

These battery systems are also used to store energy generated from renewable energy solutions like solar power.

Understanding the specifications of these batteries can be difficult for those unfamiliar with electrical systems, however.

Batteries that aren’t rated to perform as advertised are in the market, and even those who buy from respected sellers should be wary of misleading performance ratings.

Blue Nova Energy, which recently launched its MegaBoy intelligent Energy Storage Solution (iESS), told MyBroadband what to look out for – detailed below.

The problem with battery specifications
Certain vendors used load-shedding to exploit a lack of knowledge among consumers to sell battery products that aren’t necessarily intended for backup power.

While many vendors don’t explicitly lie about a battery’s specifications, subtle manipulations in how the performance factors are calculated can misconstrue its true capability.

“A lower-quality product can be made to look better on paper by obscuring or neglecting to mention certain product specifics, and therefore seem to be more affordable,” Blue Nova explained.

The company said that consumers tend to compare product prices, rather than taking long-term product running costs into consideration.

“The data available on the data sheets of these products is, for the most part, accurate. The difficulty is determining what the published data is based on exactly,” said Blue Nova.

“For instance, minimum cycle life depends mainly on chemistry, maximum daily depth of discharge (DoD) percentage, ambient temperature, and capacity retention at end-of-life.”

“The latter is sometimes mentioned in small-print in warranty documents,” the company added.

Read more......

In a big first step for Africa, the utility looks to procure 360 megawatts/1,440 megawatt-hours of storage capacity by 2021.
South Africa’s utility Eskom is preparing to launch a tender for 1.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will need to be installed by December 2021.

The large-scale energy storage tender, the first of its kind in the country and in Africa as a whole, will be split into two phases, with an initial 200 megawatts/800 megawatt-hours of capacity to be built by December 2020, an Eskom official said. 

This first phase of implementation will be divided into four packages, and will be followed by 160 megawatts/640 megawatt-hours to be installed a year later, Prince Moyo, general manager for power delivery engineering at Eskom, said during a Wednesday webinar.

The second phase will include 60 megawatts of solar to be integrated with the battery storage, along with an asset performance management system.

The tender has already been approved by South Africa’s Ministry of Finance, Moyo said. The only ministry that has not yet signed off is the Department of Public Enterprises, Moyo added. That consent “has been escalated to the highest level,” he said, without committing to a launch date for the solicitation. “It’s imminent,” he said.

Moyo called the battery tender “a flagship project” for Eskom, which supplies around 90 percent of South Africa’s electricity via more than 45 gigawatts of generation. “We are moving toward cleaner power,” he said.

The planned battery solicitation follows a 2010 loan agreement with the World Bank and other lenders for the development of a 100-megawatt concentrated solar power plant, Kiwano, with energy storage.

When this project failed to materialize, Eskom began looking into other ways to fulfill the loan agreement, said Moyo. The utility put forward a proposal to use distributed battery storage in 2017.

Frederic Verdol, World Bank Group senior power engineer, said the battery tender was also a first for the bank. “Eskom wanted to be proactive,” he said. “This was a key thing for us because it’s in line with the original objectives of the project.”

The scope of the technology-agnostic procurement will include battery operations and maintenance and physical security such as access control and alarm systems.

For the first phase of procurement, Eskom has developed its own battery energy storage system specification and taken care of site selection, environmental approvals, land acquisition and National Energy Regulator licensing, Moyo said.

“We have also done some concept design,” he stated.

The winning bidder will be expected to verify Eskom’s technical studies and provide detailed designs before implementing the battery plant, said Moyo. Eskom has identified eight potential sites for the first phase of procurement, subject to due diligence.

Site selection for the second phase of procurement is underway, with fewer than 10 sites now under consideration, Moyo revealed.

Read more.....

South Africa’s utility Eskom is preparing to launch a tender for 1.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will need to be installed by December 2021.
The large-scale energy storage tender, the first of its kind in the country and in Africa as a whole, will be split into two phases, with an initial 200 megawatts/800 megawatt-hours of capacity to be built by December 2020, an Eskom official said. 

This first phase of implementation will be divided into four packages, and will be followed by 160 megawatts/640 megawatt-hours to be installed a year later, Prince Moyo, general manager for power delivery engineering at Eskom, said during a Wednesday webinar.

The second phase will include 60 megawatts of solar to be integrated with the battery storage, along with an asset performance management system.

This first phase of implementation will be divided into four packages, and will be followed by 160 megawatts/640 megawatt-hours to be installed a year later, Prince Moyo, general manager for power delivery engineering at Eskom, said during a Wednesday webinar.

The second phase will include 60 megawatts of solar to be integrated with the battery storage, along with an asset performance management system.

The tender has already been approved by South Africa’s Ministry of Finance, Moyo said. The only ministry that has not yet signed off is the Department of Public Enterprises, Moyo added. That consent “has been escalated to the highest level,” he said, without committing to a launch date for the solicitation. “It’s imminent,” he said.

Moyo called the battery tender “a flagship project” for Eskom, which supplies around 90 percent of South Africa’s electricity via more than 45 gigawatts of generation. “We are moving toward cleaner power,” he said.

Read more.....

Since 2013, the residential energy storage business has been dominated by Germany. However, all could change as other countries further developments creating a competitive market.
As new residential markets gain momentum, German markets could be facing great competition.

As the market leader, German’s success, in the residential energy storage, can be accredited to vast amounts of support and funding. Germany has been benefiting from Europe’s largest energy storage subsidies which was made available by KfW national bank, who’s total asset worth is €472.3 billion.

Since funding began, the market has grown from nothing to over 125,000 systems. However, the funding is believe to just be responsibly for the market ‘getting on it’s feet. This is because, according to data from RWTH Aachen University in Germany, in 2018 only 4% of the German residential energy storage business were reliant on the KfW subsidies. This is a colossal difference to 2015 where roughly 55% of the industry was reliant on the KfW subsidies.

Countries like Australia are soon to follow suit. Due to increasing local policy support and further renewable and energy storage targets. The targets are applied to five of the six Australian state, indicating a possible spike in the Australian side of the residential energy storage game.

Installation in California are also thriving. This is due to the new ‘Self-Generation Incentive Program’, a budget set aside for the residential segment in 2017.

Luke Gear and Dr Xiaoxi He issued a report for IDTechEx named Batteries for Stationary Energy Storage 2019-2029. The report investigates the growth of the energy storage business. The Gear and He said: “2018 was a remarkable year for stationary energy storage. Governments and policymakers around the world are beginning to wake up to the value batteries can offer to the grid, both in terms of flexibility and decarbonisation. Over 6GWh was deployed, and market leaders such as Tesla expect to double their deployments for 2019.”