Page 85 - North American Clean Energy January/February 2020 Issue

A large-scale lithium ion ESS fire in Korea being put out by first responders. Given the large amount of energy stored by these systems, fire created when they fail can be extremely dangerous and hard to contain.
Enhanced three-phase inverter
SolarEdge Technologies, Inc. is extending its commercial offering to improve the scalability of DC optimization in large PV installations. A new version of its 120kW three phase inverter with synergy technology is designed to enable quick and easy installation and inventory management. SolarEdge has also launched a new commercial power optimizer with two MPP trackers that connects to up to four modules. The new commercial inverter and power optimizer are expected to be available in the beginning of 2020.
SolarEdge /// www.solaredge.com
How to Improve ESS’s Safety
Charging and discharging each rack in the ESS individually reduces overall fault current potential. More importantly, isolating each rack can detect faults at the rack level before they occur.
Talk to any major lithium ion battery manufacturer and they will tell you that their racks should be floating, not grounded. This is for safety reasons:
by allowing racks to float, two faults
are needed to cause an issue. Should
any cell get damaged and short to a grounded case, the loss of isolation can be immediately detected, and the entire battery rack safely removed from the battery container by the PMS. This allows for the kinds of dangerous faults found in the Korean system to be detected much earlier, before tragedy strikes.
Using a monolithic charger forces a reactionary approach. Additionally, the monolithic DC-DC converters typically deployed today are not isolated, which is an especially problematic approach when pairing batteries and PV on the same DC bus. As such, these units basically have to rely on very large fuses and for contactors to react when danger strikes. These are the exact devices that were found to have failed in the Koreans’ investigations.
In short, a major takeaway from the ESS fires observed in Korea is this:
A rack of prevention is better than a container of cure.
Hanan Fishman is the President of Alencon Systems. He has over
20 years’ experience in technology development and
commercialization. In his role at Alencon, he is responsible for managing all aspects of the company’s operations, including business development, product sales, marketing, engineering, and production teams.
Alencon /// alenconsystems.com
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Tom DeRosa
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(208) 758-9395 [email protected]
North American Clean Energy
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