Why Lithium: What You Need To Know About Lithium Power Storage

Welcome to the exciting, dynamic world of power storage.

The goal of this article is to give you access to a sampling of accurate, well-written, technically correct resources to assist you in making your important storage decisions. We have been deeply immersed in Lithium power storage since 2010 and we love what we do. We want you to be informed when you evaluate vendor claims about different batteries and their respective performance and testing data.

3 quick points before you dive into the details:

1. Remember that individual cells vs. fully assembled functioning packs (cells grouped together) have different life cycles and test differently.
These differences are significant and material when making storage decisions (e.g., an individual Lithium cell may test at 5,000 life cycles under certain conditions—-but when assembled as part of a battery pack the same conditions might only product 3,700 life cycles).
2. Performance.
Another important and fascinating part of battery integration into modular systems is also to ensure you are optimizing performance, cycle life and $/kW. It is not as simple as integrating an off-the-shelf battery pack into an off-the-shelf back-up system with a generic BMS template if your goal is to have an optimized power storage solution. The devil is in the details—and maximizing the cost of the batteries is deeply affected by how you charge, monitor, balance, store and discharge the batteries as part of the entire system.
3. Marketing headlines vs. real world accessibility.
There are significant differences between the exciting technologies being announced in research labs and the testing, time and capital required to migrate that lab technology to large volume production line products that are field-tested and hardened by real world experience.

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