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Will 1500V energy storage become the mainstream in the future?

  • news2021-04-06
  • news

Slocable 1500V solar dc cable

Slocable 1500V Solar DC Cable

 

        At the beginning of 2020, Sungrow announced that it would transplant its 1500V energy storage technology, which has been overseas for many years, to China; at major exhibitions in the second half of the year, head inverter companies exhibited 1500V energy storage system solutions. Because of its significant “cost reduction and efficiency increase” in the photovoltaic industry, high voltage has become a technological direction for many energy storage companies.

        While 1500V goes from photovoltaic to energy storage industry, it is also laden with controversy. Proponents believe that the cost and power generation efficiency of the 1000V system is difficult to meet the needs of large-scale energy storage power stations and large-capacity power generation equipment, so the development of 1500V-related energy storage products has become a trend. Opponents believe that the high voltage of 1500V will affect the consistency of the battery, the safety hazard is prominent, the plan is not mature, and the cost reduction effect may not be as obvious as the photovoltaic industry.

        Is 1500V a general trend or a short-lived technology hype? In fact, from the survey results, most leading companies including Sungrow Power Supply, Jinko, CATL and other leading companies have reached a consensus that 1500V is the direction of future development. The driving factor behind this is that the high-voltage system has three advantages: first, it corresponds to the 1500V photovoltaic system; second, the system energy density and energy conversion efficiency will be greatly improved; third, the system integration cost, container, line loss, land occupation and Construction costs will be greatly reduced.

        At the same time, the problems and challenges of the 1500V system are not small: the requirements for system safety and reliability are higher; the requirements for the technology and collaboration capabilities of components are more stringent; the standard certification system is not sound. Under current conditions, is the 1500V energy storage system safe enough? In particular, is it really feasible in the short term? There are still some controversies in the industry.

 

Slocable 1500V MC4 Connector

Slocable 1500V MC4 Connector

 

Controversy over the safety of large and small batteries

        For 1500V, the industry is clearly divided into optimists and conservatives. Optimists mostly come from power electronics and tend to look at problems from the perspective of the power system; most conservatives know more about batteries and believe that lithium battery safety should be the top priority.

        In China, Sungrow is the first company to use 1500V for energy storage. What makes Sungrow Power Supply helpless is that 1500V has been widely used abroad, but a mature technology has been criticized in China.

        Judging from the 1500V energy storage systems currently launched in China, most domestic designs are based on 280Ah lithium iron phosphate square batteries, but the pack groups are different from each other. They use 1P10S, 1P16S, and 1P20S respectively. The pack power is 8.96KWh, 14.34KWh, 17.92KWh.

        There have always been great controversies as to whether to make the battery cells of the energy storage system bigger or smaller, and the advantages and disadvantages of both are obvious. Unlike domestically, Samsung SDI and LG Chem’s main ternary batteries do not exceed 120Ah, and Tesla in particular has taken the advantages of small batteries to the extreme.

        Generally, it is relatively more difficult for large-capacity batteries to dissipate heat, and it is more difficult to control the consistency of the energy storage system; when small batteries need to be connected in series or parallel during the system integration process, it is impossible for BMS and EMS to sample every node. Each cell data is collected, so cell management is more complicated and the integration cost is high. Generally, the three-level architecture starting with the module data is adopted, and the data collected by the two-in-four combination is the data of the four batteries or the two batteries, which cannot reflect the current data.

        ”From the perspective of the layout of the leading companies, the current energy storage system solution is still bigger than the single cell. The Ningde era energy battery is mainly 280Ah, and BYD 302Ah will soon be available.” Technical leader of a 1500V energy storage system integrator Say.

        A large battery manufacturer said that 65Ah is a basic threshold for the current battery industry. For many small battery manufacturers, the product line has been finalized and can only increase the current through the parallel connection of battery clusters, but this is no longer the mainstream route. In his view, the advantage of large batteries is that they are not connected in series and the purchased data is the single data. In the management of EMS and BMS, the reliability of the data will be higher. In the case of fewer series and parallel connections, the system is stable. Sex should be high.

        He used “high” and  “large” to summarize the development direction of energy storage, where “high” refers to high-voltage systems. The current 1500V technology is mature and has the potential for mass promotion; “large” refers to the current large-capacity batteries in the industry, which can greatly increase the storage capacity. The energy density of the energy system is an inevitable trend in the choice of system development.

        But this is exactly what many BMS companies worry about. In their view, small batteries have small advantages and the granularity of the system is smaller, thereby reducing the impact of the “barrel effect” of a single battery on the battery cluster and the entire energy storage system. influences. More importantly, the battery is a complex system. The commercialization of high-voltage large batteries requires a certain period of verification. No battery manufacturer has given relevant data yet. Among them, as time goes by, there will be a series of problems that have been discovered and not yet discovered.

        Li Guohong, product line director of Sungrow’s energy storage system product center, believes that the body of the battery is the foundation. 1500V requires higher consistency of the battery, but the energy storage system architecture design related to the service life of the system is also very important. It is directly Affects the system stability and return on investment of energy storage on the new energy side. “If the cell is 50Ah, there will be fewer cells in series and parallel. The core technology of using large cells lies in the pack design, including the consistency of heat dissipation and cells, which must be repeatedly verified through system testing.”

        Li Guohong introduced that compared with the 1000V system, Sungrow adopted some new concepts and methods to ensure the safety of the 1500V energy storage system: BCP branch circuit protection, uniform cell temperature uniformity in the entire system, fuse + contactor instead of circuit breaker , Flammable gas detection, safety protection design, etc.

 

Slocable 1500V Mc4 Inline Fuse Holder

Slocable 1500V Mc4 Inline Fuse Holder

 

Photovoltaic faction’s arms race on “cost reduction and efficiency increase”

        Judging from the background of 1500V makers, most of these companies have photovoltaic and power electronics backgrounds, and they are also loyal believers of 1500V.

        In the photovoltaic industry, since 2015, 1500V voltage has become popular in China. Nowadays, the photovoltaic system has basically realized all the switching from 1000V to 1500V. The cost of the whole system can be saved by 0.2 yuan/Wp, which has contributed to the promotion of photovoltaic parity on the Internet, is also a tool for leading photovoltaic companies to reshuffle.

        The voltage upgrade of photovoltaics has laid a good foundation for energy storage in electronic components. In 2017, Sungrow took the lead in launching a 1500V energy storage system and began to migrate high-voltage technology from photovoltaics to energy storage. Since then, more than 80% of Sungrow’s large-scale energy storage projects put into operation in overseas markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have adopted 1500V systems.

        At the 2019 SNEC exhibition, Kehua Hengsheng presented a new generation of 1500V 1MW/2MWh box-type energy storage system and 1500V 3.4MW photovoltaic inverter booster integrated machine to the world.

        Since 2020, Ningde Times, Kelu, NARI Protection, Shuangyili, TBEA, and Shangneng Electric have successively released 1500V related energy storage products, and this trend is likely to accelerate.

        For the owner, the only thing that needs to be considered is which solution is more cost-effective under the premise of safety.

        Central power generation enterprises including SPIC and Huaneng are already demonstrating and verifying the feasibility of the 1500V energy storage system. In 2018, the Yellow River Hydropower has taken the 1500V energy storage system as a key plan for inspection in the energy storage demonstration base, and will be in 2020. The 1500V energy storage system is used in batches in the energy storage power station supporting the UHV project. Huaneng’s Mendi project in the United Kingdom also uses the 1500V system.

        An analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance believes that whether the product is good or not requires market verification. If 1500V can eat up most of the market, it can show that the product or price does have an advantage.

        Just like the ternary and iron-lithium disputes, behind so many companies, especially those with a photovoltaic background, bet intensively on 1500V, it is a fight for the right to speak in technology. In the eyes of many photovoltaic practitioners, installing energy storage on the DC side and sharing inverters with photovoltaic power stations are their future development goals.

        Of course, a healthy industry should never have only one voice. Today’s energy storage industry is in an era where multiple technical routes coexist and a hundred flowers bloom, and it is also an era full of controversies.

        And this kind of dispute is often a sign of progress. Every technology is not perfect, and companies need to maintain a certain degree of openness. Once path dependence is formed, when people encounter a new technical solution, they often instinctively compare it with their own established attitude, and then make a decision quickly.

        A few years ago, when photovoltaic monocrystalline technology was just emerging, polycrystalline companies were unable to change their inherent perceptions, believing that monocrystalline has high cost, high attenuation, and its “efficiency” is a vain reputation. In the end, under the leadership of Li Zhenguo, Longi took a different approach and seized a vast territory on the territory of photovoltaic monocrystalline.

        With the “new energy + energy storage” gradually becoming a trend, the evolution of energy storage systems towards large capacity has not stopped. Especially in the absence of a cost-control mechanism, the promulgation of the policy of installing additional energy storage on the new energy side has put a lot of pressure on investment income for new energy developers. How to effectively reduce the cost of the energy storage system and improve the efficiency of power generation is still the future of storage. The core subject of energy industry development.

        Some analysts believe that to solve these two major problems, “cryptography” is still in technological innovation. High voltage is one of the important links of technological innovation. Whether 1500V can be widely promoted in the short term depends on whether the industry can reach the greatest common divisor in terms of technical performance, safety, life and cost.

 

Extending Solar Panel Cable

Slocable 1500V Extending Solar Panel Cable

 

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