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10th July 2016

Intersolar/EES 2016 - Part 2: Small ventures at the Intersolar

End of June the 25th Intersolar 2016 took place in Munich and as a part of it the EES, the Electrical Energy Storage fair and conference. This series of posts will share the individual impressions and findings of three busy days mainly in the EES hall besides the five other halls of Intersolar.

In our first post we presented companies of the automotive industry present at the EES with electrical storage solutions, including big companies like Daimler or BMW/SolarWatt. Kreisel is not one of those big ones, but it seems that the young Austrian company from the region of Linz run by the three Kreisel-brothers is on its way to become a technology driver and technology supplier for automotive industry and for home storage systems. See article in German magazine Spiegel. 

There had been more even smaller upcoming ventures at the Intersolar and EES fair. Here are the three which caught our especial attention:

·         Invenox: The start-up from Munich, a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich, Invenox presented at a small booth in the pavilion of “Bayern Innovativ” its patent-pending CONCHIFERA Technology. Instead of welding contacts of batteries for modules CONCHIFERA is a technology where the 18650 batteries are clamped between two aluminium circuit boards. The boards are supposed to act as well as cooling surface transferring the heat via the poles of the batteries. According to Invenox the advantages are (1) higher energy density and (2) easy cell replacement due to the clamping mechanism, (3) better economics due to simpler production process of the modules and (4) higher lifetime due to the thermal conduction.

·         BOS-AG: Even though the Balance of Storage Systems AG (BOS-AG) had only a small booth in the German pavilion it got the big platform as finalist for the EES Award 2016. BOS-AG presented its hybrid storage system, which is a combination of lithium and lead acid batteries. The system combines the low costs of lead acid batteries and the high cycle rate of lithium batteries. The lead acid battery provides the stored energy basis keeping the number of cycles low and the state of charge high while the lithium battery is charged and discharged with higher flexibility and more cycles. Additionally to the hybrid system BOS-AG offers a Lithium add on to existing lead acid batteries, the Lithium Extension battery LE300. 

·         ferroamp: Another finalist for the EES Award 2016 which got our attention is ferroamp which even was one of the winners. ferroamp won the price for its EnergyHub system. ferroamp offers a package of components which can be combined in the EnergyHub system, consisting of a DC “nanogrid”in which PV, batteries and charger interact. The DC “homegrid” is interacting with the public AC grid by a bi-directional three-phase inverter.

This is the second post about our own impressions from the Intersolar and EES in Munich from 22 nd to 24 th June 2016.