New Industry Products

Ideal Power Gains Key Certification for Grid Storage Battery Converter

February 07, 2013 by Jeff Shepard

Ideal Power Converters (IPC) announced that its 30kW Battery Converter has been certified for UL1741 conformance. The certification for UL1741 ensures safety and grid compatibility for distributed generation technology that supplies power to the electric grid in North America.

"Battery converters can contribute up to half the energy efficiency losses and costs in grid storage systems," said Paul Bundschuh, CEO of Ideal Power Converters. "IPC's Battery Converter provides both battery charging and inverter functions with higher efficiency and lower installed cost thereby improving the economic value of battery storage. Industry leaders are working with us on emerging grid-storage applications including commercial peak demand reduction, utility load shifting, buffer storage for EV fast charging, and bi-directional EV charging."

IPC has invented and patented indirect Energy Packet Switching™ topology that uses a standard lightweight hardware design and embedded application-specific software to serve the fragmented multi-billion dollar power conversion market. This approach dramatically improves efficiency, installation and manufacturing costs. IPC's initial focus is on photovoltaic (PV), grid storage, and electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure applications.

IPC's 30kW Battery Converter weighs only 97lbs, much less than the weight of conventional bi-directional battery chargers. It is easily wall-mountable reducing shipping and installation costs by up to 90 percent. It is built on the same Universal Power Converter Platform™ as the Company's initial PV inverter product, and is the next step in the company's roadmap of solutions for photovoltaic, grid-storage and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The Battery Converter provides greater than 96 percent charging and inverter efficiency on average.

"Grid storage battery converters often operate at low rated power, and the IPC Battery Converter delivers 95 percent efficiency at 10 percent of rated power, compared to 85-88 percent efficiency for conventional charger/inverter systems," said Bill Alexander, Chief Technical Officer of Ideal Power Converters. "This can reduce battery costs by about 7 percent and electric energy operational costs by about 14 percent."

The Battery Converter provides bi-directional power conversion over a full power DC range from 500 to 1000V dc, and with 60Amp DC limit down to 200Vdc. It also provides isolation between the battery system and the grounded 480Vac grid without the need for either an internal or external transformer. It is suitable for interfacing a wide variety of battery systems to the grid including new and used electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries.