On the path towards the electrification of mobility, batteries installed in cars will be of great importance… and stationary ones to store it and thus be able to use it when appropriate. If a few days ago we knew about the LFP battery with 1,000 km of autonomy, from less than CATL, the largest producer of batteries for electric vehicles in the world, now a container from the same manufacturer arrives, with 6.25 MWh capacity (also an LFP battery) that promises zero power and capacity degradation for the first five years of operation.
This new device that CATL has named TENER (or Tianheng, depending on where in the world you are) is described as the “world's first mass-producible energy storage system with zero degradation in the first five years of use.”
Anyone who has had a mobile phone or drives an electric vehicle will have seen that lithium batteries, the core of these technologies, lose part of their energy capacity over time, which means having these devices plugged in for longer.
Although improvements in power density and charging technologies should not depend as much on chargers, the ultimate goal is zero degradation. That is what the Chinese company CATL, the world's largest manufacturer of electric car batteries, claims to have achieved – or at least delayed – ahead of LG, BYD, Samsung and Panasonic.
TENER is a large battery pack housed inside a metal box designed to store energy from intermittent renewable energy such as solar and wind. As we said, there are 6.25 MWh of long-lasting lithium iron phosphate batteries from the L series, with an energy density of 430Wh/L. To put you in context, the capacity of the Tesla Megapack is 3.9 MWh and it increases the energy density by 30% per unit compared to previous iterations.
The company says the new configuration employs a “biomimetic” solid electrolyte interface layer on the electrode and “self-assembled electrolyte technologies” to enable the movement of lithium ions without suffering degradation in power or capacity, while effectively preventing thermal leak. It advertises more than 15,000 charge/discharge cycles and an operational useful life of 20 years.
A platform has been developed to test the security of its energy storage systems in different power grid configurations and will monitor the projects after installation with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The company is now looking for potential customers and, although the price of the TENER technology has not been revealed, it shows that the company has its eyes on the global energy storage market.
