From ESS-news
The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and energy storage manufacturer Stryten Energy are giving new life to a more than 160-year-old technology: lead batteries. Stryten Energy is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia with manufacturing facilities in Kansas.
A new lead BESS, unveiled last week, now sits on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus and will serve as an experimentation site for advanced research on medium-duration energy storage solutions and applications.
Designed to round out Georgia Tech’s clean energy offering – along with a previously-installed solar array and a new electric vehicle (EV) charging testbed – the lead BESS will enable bi-directional EV charging and load shifting of peak solar power generation.
The system will provide backup power and support the school’s microgrid and grid-interactive efficient buildings program. In doing so, the project creates a real-time, real-world testbed for understanding how lead batteries perform in advanced energy applications, particularly in institutional environments.
While lithium-ion batteries continue to dominate the energy storage industry, a renewed focus on lead batteries for stationary storage reflects how the landscape is rapidly diversifying and growing more saturated with novel and legacy chemistries.
Lead batteries offer several advantages over lithium-ion devices, including a proven safety record, recyclability and domestic availability of materials.
“At comparable costs of deployment, lead is ideal for smaller, behind-the-meter [customer-side] applications,” Scott Childers, vice president of essential power at Stryten Energy, told ESS News. As the U.S. policy environment grows increasingly focused on building secure supply chains, lead batteries are growing more appealing.
“The lead systems are 100% domestically built and Stryten has institutionalized a 98%-plus closed-loop recycling behavior,” added Childers.
Georgia Tech’s role will go beyond hosting the installation. Researchers from the university’s Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions Laboratory and the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) will collect and analyze data on system performance, lifecycle impact, and grid interaction.
“On the research side, the BESS will complement…
Read the full article on ESS-news.com.
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