Repurposed Battery Energy Storage System for use in applications of Renewable Energy Generation

Abstract

Electric and hybrid electric vehicles’ batteries not only have great potential for alleviating the world’s gasoline consumption problem, but may also stand poised to secure the world’s renewable energy generation. Electric and hybrid electric vehicles’ batteries that have reached the end of their cycle life in vehicles may still have the capacity to be repurposed into stationary utility energy storage. However, the phenomenon known as battery aging must be given careful consideration in the construction of a repurposed battery energy storage system. The battery aging phenomenon reduces the battery’s nominal voltage, capacity and current rating, while increasing its internal resistance. These factors were taken into consideration for the development of the Repurposed Battery Energy Storage System (RBESS). The system utilizes a method called Multi-Level Interlaced Pulse Charging (MLIPC) which was developed for the RBESS to manage the battery’s voltage, current, and energy to extend the useful cycle life of the batteries. The repurposed battery energy storage system has been modeled in PSCAD/EMTDC and tested in a constructed hardware implementation of the system.