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| Dr Lan Lam, CSIRO, the primary inventor of the UltraBattery. (Supplied: CSIRO) |
The consortium was an international one, with CSIRO in Australia, the battery was built by Furukawa Battery Company in Japan and tested in the United Kingdom through American based Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium.
Now an Australian company, Ecoult in Sydney, has been commercialising it in a system it calls UltraFlex.
That uses the UItraBattery as a system for off-grid and dual-purpose applications.
Ecoult CEO John Wood said efficient and commercial energy storage could be expensive as it requires many different parts.
"When we look into energy storage, it's not only the cost of the battery," he said.
Audio: John Wood on Ecoult commercialising CSIRO developed lead-acid UltraBattery (ABC Rural) |
"These are all of the critical economic considerations when you're applying energy storage."
Battery storage is essential for managing renewable and off-grid systems, by smoothing out the peaks and the troughs of energy production.
For example at night when there is no sun for solar cells or when the wind is not blowing enough to turn wind power turbines.
Mr Wood said one of the challenges with the traditional lead-acid batteries, was its inability to sustain a partial state of charge, which the addition of the super-capacitor had changed.
"When we're doing things like integrating renewables into the grid or setting up micro-grids, what we're actually doing is cycling the battery so it's never quite full, never quite empty," he said.
"That's a partial state of charge. Continually charging and discharging the battery to take energy and moving it in time for use when its needed.
"All batteries in this competitive state, such as lithium ion and other types, are partial state of charge applications.
"Lead-acid is the largest source of chemical storage on the planet."Mr Wood said there were applications for all types of different batteries but added the UltraBattery had significant advantages over alternate technologies in some cases.
"The lead-acid battery industry is fully sustainable. Most of the lead-acid batteries that are being used have been through the recycling phase several times," he said.
"It is the most recycled product on the planet: the batteries are manufactured, they come back to the factories where they're broken down to their components — plastic, lead and acid.
"They're put back through the production process and find their way back to the market place."
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