Much has been made of the interoperability problem with home energy storage systems. Existing solar customers need battery systems that can connect easily with their legacy equipment. AC-coupled storage has proliferated to solve that problem.
When Maine-based Pika Energy got to work designing power electronics for a new residential storage platform, the team decided to go in a different direction.
“AC coupling is attractive because you can retrofit it. However, actually getting the new battery inverter to talk to the legacy PV inverter is not a simple thing to do,” said company President and co-founder Ben Polito. “Do you want to send your best technician to figure out how to interact with that 2011 inverter in an optimal way? It becomes more like a science project than a scalable solution.”
The desire for easily scalable deployment and reduced installation time led Polito to a plug-and-play platform approach. That product is now available for order as the Harbor Smart Battery, a collaboration with Panasonic Eco Solutions North America.
The system will ship later this year in 10- and 15-kilowatt-hour configurations, offering up to 6.7 kilowatts of instantaneous power. It integrates Panasonic lithium-ion battery modules and is designed for easy pairing with solar generation using the same inverter for both. It can handle islanded backup as well as solar self-supply.
The different elements link up through Pika’s REbus nanogrid platform, which Polito describes as “USB for clean power.” It provides a ready-made hookup so that different home energy assets can all communicate with each other, coordinating system performance based on market price signals.
The Harbor system has built-in electronics to connect the Panasonic batteries into the REbus system. That makes it easy to slide the battery modules into place with minimal electrical work. The individual components weigh less than 75 pounds, so they don’t require large teams to carry.
“The whole 15 kilowatt-hour battery solution can be installed by one guy or gal in less than an hour,” said Polito, whose company recently raised $2 million.
The design concept reflects a theory of what the residential storage market will look like in the future.
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