A battery software start-up company spun out of one of the largest research groups for energy storage at RWTH Aachen University in Germany recently secured €2.3 million in seed funding to commercialise and expand a platform that aims to take a lot of the “hassle” out of operating energy storage systems.
Dr Kai-Philipp Kairies, a battery scientist and former research programme leader and technical consulting department head at the industry-focused university, is now CEO of ACCURE. The company uses both laboratory and operational data to determine and forecast the health of batteries, allowing customers to analyse and monitor the best ways to use those assets and to gain transparency on how long they will last in the field under a range of usage parameters.
Dr Kairies spoke to us for our recent tech deep dive into Tesla’s Battery Day and we also took the opportunity to learn more about ACCURE and what it aims to do. From working at the heart of the University at Aachen’s “amazing battery technology ecosystem,” Kairies and his colleagues realised that mobility and energy companies and grid operators alike were “all facing very similar challenges, based on the fact that batteries are pretty complex”.
ACCURE manages more than 200,000 battery modules out in the field, including residential storage for one of Germany’s major providers, E3DC, utility-scale storage systems and electromobility: not just electric cars and their chargers, but also electric ships too.
What are some of the key challenges that you said your customers are facing, based on the “complexity” of batteries and their operation?
Designing an energy storage system is a very lengthy and difficult process and then operating it the right way – that would be manageable, but most system integrators have at least two, three, or four suppliers of battery modules.
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