Powin Energy yesterday officially launched its first high voltage battery storage product, with the Oregon-headquartered battery energy storage solutions provider claiming that 500MWh of customer orders have already been contracted for it.
Powin said its new 1500Vdc Stack360E is compatible with battery cells from various suppliers and is set to begin mass production in the third quarter of this year, with deliveries scheduled to begin also within Q3. Along with the company’s 1000Vdc Stack230E product — which was launched as part of a new product range last year — the Stack360E is designed for applications requiring three hours of storage or more.
The company said that moving to higher voltage reduces overall balance-of-plant costs for battery storage projects, increasing the general power rating of inverters used while the unit’s module design makes improvements on previously available products from the company, allowing for faster installation, smaller footprint and reduced temperature variance.
The US company joins rival Sungrow in having a 1500V battery storage product available for the commercial and grid storage markets, with the energy storage division of the Chinese solar inverter maker having launched its solution in August last year at SNEC, the world’s biggest solar trade show, held in Shanghai.
Powin’s Stack portfolio products all use the company’s own battery monitoring and control platform, called StackOS. The range comes with a 20-year performance guarantee. In December the company announced it would be ramping up its annual production capacity at facilities in Taiwan in response to both what it said was “massive order growth” but also to insulate it from "uncertainties" in relations between the US and China, where its other manufacturing bases are.
Powin recently gained in excess of US$100 million of equity investment which the company said would allow it to improve its integrated software and hardware platform, with investors Trilantic North America and Energy Impact Partners buying a large stake in the company, which has built and delivered more than 600MWh of battery systems worldwide in eight different countries. Powin claimed its pipeline of contracted projects for the next five years stands at more than 4,000MWh. In October, the company's senior director of product KJ Plank also told Energy-Storage.news that the company is expecting to see "exponential growth" in demand for DC-coupled solar-plus-storage solutions.
