Well known alkaline battery producer Duracell is launching a residential energy storage solution through California-based distributor Power Center+. Power Center also distributes the Eguana line of energy storage systems.
The Duracell Power Center product line will consist of 5-kW and 10-kW inverter outputs with lithium-iron phosphate batteries expandable from 14 kWh to 84 kWh. The Power Center’s AC-coupling setup allows new and existing residential solar owners to store excess solar power for use in the evening, maximizing their solar investment, while increasing energy security and independence, all without additional hardware. In addition, Power Center offers the flexibility of remote software upgrades to meet ever changing power regulatory standards.
“Duracell sees tremendous opportunity to create effective green power management solutions for the home. Ultimately allowing the consumer to manage, store, and control all aspects of power within their home. The Duracell brand brings along a history of quality and reliability which consumers have trusted over many decades,” stated Roberto Mendez, President of Duracell North America. “We are proud to work with our licensee partner to bring this important offering to the market.”
“Our Home Energy Storage solutions provide the entrée for expansion into a full product ecosystem as we march toward complete residential power management. We are very excited to be at the forefront of technology development and deployment,” stated Aakar Patel, President of Power Center+.
The Power Center’s support grid-connected solar self-consumption, time of use (TOU) rate shifting and provide home backup power. These systems are now available in North America and the Caribbean markets, with certification standards matching UL 1741, UL 9540, California’s Rule 21, and Hawaii’s Rule 14H.
News item from Duracell
Duracell partner with Omega, which license the the technologies from Eguana, a Canadian company. Based on the Eguanas Twitter account, the company currently is using the battery from Pylontech, a subsidary of ZTE. But it is also working along side with 24M, a Boston based company, and Freyr on the semisolid battery.
Eguana is also likely to be grid ready, I believe. The company partners with E-gear in Hawaii to participate in the virtual power plant program.
https://www.eguanatech.com/news-and-media/news/eguana-receives-36m-first-order-for-hawaii-virtual-power-plant-program-
This first offering is pushing the envelope towards an all encompassing micro-grid in capacity. I do believe it is shy of running a home islanded for the majority of the time as for most residences to keep from getting jammed up with intermittent high surge motors like, pool pumps, well pumps, HVAC compressors/heating elements, even vacuum cleaners. Systems need to have components selected that have grid interactive smart inverters that can be stacked in Master/Slave format for those large surges and enable something like 24kW to 30kW surges for 30 seconds or less. With smart electrical panels like SPAN, controllers like Lumin or smart circuit breakers from Eaton, Leviton, Siemens and I’m sure there’s others that can automate ones home and create a set of critical isolated circuits for islanded resiliency for the home whether the grid is available or not for extended periods.
By mid January, if not earlier Eguana expects to have their new 10Kw unit with up to 84kwhs of storage, not certain what the surge value is, will find out when they report on the certification. That will be the premium evolve, and the agreement with Omega/Power Center+ indicates premium systems will have the Duracell brand, the Evolve is fully island capable, & was initially designed right from the start to be grid tied, so it is totally grid capable. They also have a 15kw small commercial that is being redesigned to allow for Islanding, it was designed for demand charge time of use shifting etc. Eguana has also indicated that when the Eguana BMS they’ve signed an mou with Freyr, to design it, and allow Freyr to sell it (not exclusive to Freyr- prob will license to others 24M partners. True resilience.
The Evovle is the system the Hawaiian Emergency Demand Response Program, now refrenced as the Battery Bonus program (also a separate vpp with a similar name which is confusing people) As of the progress meeting of Hawaiian Electric it was revealed that Tesla
s system had not yet been able to meet the program system requirements (for immediate dispatch I believe). The idividual who reported that thought they might be able to have it ready by the end of October, but no announcement has yet been made. Eguana shipped products for the program soon after it was announced in July 2021. Tesla’s powerwalls are eligible for the other vpp program.
LFP is the way to go for home solar storage.
Less expensive and more robust then Li.
Every home should have them wether they have solar or not.
Hope the price is right.
LiFePO4 (a.k.a. LFP) is still a Li chemistry. It does have cycle life advantages over NMC or NCA cells, as well as the fact no cobalt is used, but they tend to be larger, heavier and at this point still more expensive. They also have lower cell voltage, necessitating more cells in series and a somewhat more complex BMS for thermal protection and balancing.
More competition is always good for innovation. This is great news! My big question would be whether their system is grid-forming like Tesla Powerwall and Enphase Encharge?
I currently have a large solar PV array on my house (101% annual offset) but no battery back up because it is currently cost-prohibitive (at least for me). When I finally do add storage, it absolutely must be grid-forming. If it is, I could make it through a 9-month power outage. If its not, 1 to 3 days? I just dont like those odds.
I love Duracell batteries. That all I buy when I’m looking for batteries. They are definitely the best and I’m sure they’ll always deliver Quality. It’s going to be great to have them in this place as well
It is unclear where Duracell gets their LFP battery packs from. Following the investments, I believe Berkshire Hathaway owns a piece of Duracell and Berkshire Hathaway is also heavily invested in BYD a well known (LFP) manufacturing line in China that has released their “blade” battery pack in the last couple of years for use in BEVs. This may be a “Chinese” connection that may or may not be constricted by tariffs in the future. I would say that most of the (LFP) battery cells are probably “Made in China”.