Smart phones, smart cars, and now comes smart batteries.
Israeli energy firm Nation-E has developed a new battery system capable of communicating with the power grid. Reuters reports that depending on the time of day, the local demand for energy, and current tariff costs, the system functions like a self-contained smart grid and is able to compute whether it should store power for later use or if it should use it immediately. The decisions it makes cut could customer’s utility bills as well as make wind and solar energy storage more efficient.
“What is new here is not the concept of the battery. What is new is the ability of the battery to communicate with the grid, with renewable energy, with other elements of the electrical system,” said Institute for the Analysis of Global Security director Gal Luft. “That opens a lot of new opportunities.”
A charged 6.7 kWh battery system costing around $25,000 could provide a few hours of power for a single house while a $3.5 million 1MWh system could power a whole neighborhood. And while those prices sound high, the technology is obviously still very new. Renewables like wind and solar are most definitely the future of energy, but they both require a more efficient way to store that energy for later use or for when the weather is not cooperating. Smart batteries such as these from Nation-E could help solve that problem
Now if only my cellphone battery was smart enough to recharge itself automatically when it’s about to run out, since it seems I am not smart enough to keep up with it. Now that would be something.
Image Credit: james_jhs/Flickr