The development and application of lithium-ion battery technology is booming, with market demand continuing to increase. As one of its important applications, battery energy storage systems have emerged, including small-scale home energy storage, large-scale industrial and commercial energy storage, and ultra-large-scale energy storage power stations. Large-scale energy storage systems are an important component of future new energy systems and smart grids, and energy storage batteries are the key to large-scale energy storage systems.
Energy storage systems are analogous to batteries, and energy storage has many applications, such as power systems in power plants, backup power supplies for communication base stations, and data centers. Backup power technologies for communication base stations and data centers are DC technologies, which are less advanced than battery technologies. Energy storage technology is much broader, encompassing not only DC technologies but also converter technology, grid connection technology, and grid dispatch and control technology.
Currently, the energy storage industry does not have a clear definition of what constitutes electrical energy storage, but an energy storage system should possess two characteristics:
1. Energy storage systems can participate in grid dispatch (or the energy in the energy storage system can be fed back to the main grid).
2. Compared with power lithium batteries, the performance requirements of lithium-ion batteries for energy storage are lower.
Currently, most domestic lithium-ion battery companies do not have independent energy storage R&D teams. Energy storage R&D is generally conducted by the power lithium battery team in their spare time during power lithium battery project work. Even if there is an independent energy storage R&D team, the energy storage team will be smaller than the power team. Compared with power lithium batteries, the technical characteristics of energy storage systems are high voltage (generally designed according to 1Vdc requirements) and multiple series and parallel connections of a single battery cell. Therefore, the electrical safety and battery status monitoring of energy storage systems are more complex, requiring dedicated personnel to study and solve them.
