It's a great company to work for. Lots of smart, motivated folks with tons of experience both in the energy industry and other connected industries. I'm in the second wave of new hires, working as an architect on the software system that will be managing the scale of the infrastructure as we build out. That said, my knowledge is obviously fairly specific to the software, and the hardware bit that I've come to understand is primarily through osmosis :) To try and answer what I can without violating the usual secret squirrel stuff:
Efficient infrastructure - we're able to charge and discharge at a high level of input to output efficiency. Typically, in the energy storage business, you lose a lot of energy via inverters and other technology. Our secret sauce gets around a lot of this, though I don't think I'm able to disclose exactly how it works. It's incredibly elegant in it's simplicity though, and can plug directly into the wild west of the grid. We're also able to network together a significant amount of capacity in almost any configuration for a very reasonable cost per KW. That means we can take our storage system and sell you 80kw/h discharged over 4 hours (20kw per hour), or 40kw over 2 hours, or just keep adding capacity to change those numbers further. While we're a bit young to be just "plug and play", we'll get there as time goes by.
In terms of battery technology, we have a few tricks up our sleeves and are working with a variety of researchers, but for the most part we just work with what's on the market - meaning high end lead acid (best bang for the buck, and the maintenance story is improving), and lithium ion where people want it. This helps keep purchase and maintenance costs low, but we've also built our own battery management system that lets us plug and play any battery tech on the market today, as well as several that are on the way but haven't hit a decent economy of scale yet.
I can't comment on specifics of the BMS, other than we're building the hardware as well as the software, which lets us play with a variety of models for handling battery input and output.
It's a market that's seeing plenty of entries and new competition every day, but it's also really cool to see how people are approaching the problem and working with partners to drive the cost of energy down. That can only be a good thing for all of us!
Comments
It's a great company to work for. Lots of smart, motivated folks with tons of experience both in the energy industry and other connected industries. I'm in the second wave of new hires, working as an architect on the software system that will be managing the scale of the infrastructure as we build out. That said, my knowledge is obviously fairly specific to the software, and the hardware bit that I've come to understand is primarily through osmosis :) To try and answer what I can without violating the usual secret squirrel stuff:
Efficient infrastructure - we're able to charge and discharge at a high level of input to output efficiency. Typically, in the energy storage business, you lose a lot of energy via inverters and other technology. Our secret sauce gets around a lot of this, though I don't think I'm able to disclose exactly how it works. It's incredibly elegant in it's simplicity though, and can plug directly into the wild west of the grid. We're also able to network together a significant amount of capacity in almost any configuration for a very reasonable cost per KW. That means we can take our storage system and sell you 80kw/h discharged over 4 hours (20kw per hour), or 40kw over 2 hours, or just keep adding capacity to change those numbers further. While we're a bit young to be just "plug and play", we'll get there as time goes by.
In terms of battery technology, we have a few tricks up our sleeves and are working with a variety of researchers, but for the most part we just work with what's on the market - meaning high end lead acid (best bang for the buck, and the maintenance story is improving), and lithium ion where people want it. This helps keep purchase and maintenance costs low, but we've also built our own battery management system that lets us plug and play any battery tech on the market today, as well as several that are on the way but haven't hit a decent economy of scale yet.
I can't comment on specifics of the BMS, other than we're building the hardware as well as the software, which lets us play with a variety of models for handling battery input and output.
It's a market that's seeing plenty of entries and new competition every day, but it's also really cool to see how people are approaching the problem and working with partners to drive the cost of energy down. That can only be a good thing for all of us!