“Batteries must do more than just work—they have to scale.”
Source: www.greentechmedia.com
>”[…] The startup is a software developer and system integrator that has attracted investment, personnel and a growing roster of turnkey energy storage projects.
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Companies like the 30-employee Greensmith are winning energy storage projects not because they are building better batteries but because they are writing software that integrates batteries with inverters and allows energy storage to work with the grid at scale. Greensmith works with a variety of battery chemistries from different vendors, as well as multiple inverters and power electronics partners.
New battery technologies and projects
Amongst other technologies, Greensmith is using Aquion Energy’s sodium-ion battery. The Pittsburgh, Penn.-based Aquion says its technology can deliver round-trip energy efficiency of 85 percent; a ten-year, 5,000-plus-cycle lifespan; energy storage capacity optimized to charge and discharge for multi-hour applications; and perhaps most notably, a price point of $250 per kilowatt-hour.
In April, Aquion closed a $55 million Series D venture capital investment, bringing total investments and grants to more than $100 million. New investors Bill Gates, Yung’s Enterprise, Nick and Joby Pritzker (through their family’s firm Tao Invest), Bright Capital, and Gentry Venture Partners joined previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundation Capital, and Advanced Technology Ventures in the round. Aquion is already producing its 1.5-kilowatt-hour S10 Battery Stack units, as well as an 18-kilowatt-hour system that combines twelve of its S10 units.
Greensmith is also using ViZn Energy Systems’ zinc redox flow battery energy storage technology. ViZn aims to produce a 80-kilowatt/160-kilowatt-hour system housed in a 20-foot shipping container, as well as larger systems. Other flow battery firms include American Vanadium, EnerVault, Primus Power, Imergy and ZBB Energy.
The CEO of the firm told GTM that Greensmith is developing a hybrid system using both the Aquion and ViZn storage chemistries.
Since its 2006 founding, Greensmith has deployed 30 battery energy systems for eighteen different customers, nine of them utilities, and is aiming to have 23 megawatts of systems under management by year’s end. […]”<
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