Page 49 - North American Clean Energy July/August 2020 Issue

You see, new batteries, like the ones that come with your new laptop, are more stable on account of the fact that they are not old and are always shipped below 10 percent charge. That means they don’t carry much energy. It’s also why, when your new product arrives, you need to charge the battery. Old batteries, however, can be faulty or damaged. And there’s no guarantee any one battery is not still 90 percent charged – packing a real punch should it fail by igniting its neighboring batteries into a fireball.
Therefore, if we can find a better way
to ship old batteries - a safe way to pack them, so if they do fail, the danger is contained – we can unlock an entire supply and recycling business. If the big shipping corporations could find safe packing materials, then battery and device makers would be able to start including those materials as postage-paid mailing bags, returning old batteries directly to processing centers. Congress or other rule-makers may even insist on it.
The good news is that a battery-
proof shipping package may be on
the verge of reality. In fact, it’s already here. The technology is sound, and the commercialization is in progress. In a recent joint venture, NASA sent storage bags to the International Space Station. These bags are designed to store laptop batteries, limiting any fires in case they fail. And in May, a licensing agreement was reached for a major shipping provider to use this NASA technology expressly for shipping old, damaged, or returned batteries. That’s a first step in getting them in the approval process for major shipping companies.
Will safe shipping for old batteries trigger major investments in battery recapture and recycling? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. There are simply too many devices – medical equipment, electric cars, marine gear, cell phones – to think that we’re going to rely only on new batteries and battery material forever. Getting our old batteries from one place to another – out of our homes and into major reuse pathways – is the biggest step to making that happen.
Michael Mo is the CEO of KULR Technology, (OTC: KULR) which is a development partner with NASA and other space and defense companies. KULR’s proprietary, space-used carbon architecture is the core of their thermal management products for energy storage and high-value electronic components.
KULR Technology
/// kulrtechnology.com
Residential inverter improvements
SolarEdge is upgrading its StorEdge inverter by transitioning to HD-Wave technology and providing a new backup interface. The new StorEdge inverter is designed to support connection to backup generators or up to three StorEdge inverters with each DC coupled to two batteries. SolarEdge has also launched a new backup StorEdge interface that raises available backup power and eliminates pre-defining loads for simplified energy management.
SolarEdge /// www.solaredge.com
North American Clean Energy
49