Ideal Power Converters’ 30 kW battery converter has been ETL certified for UL1741 conformance, according to the company.
The ETL certification for UL1741 ensures safety and grid compatibility for distributed generation technology that supplies power to the electric grid in North America.
IPC has invented and patented indirect Energy Packet Switching topology that uses a standard lightweight hardware design and embedded application-specific software to serve the fragmented multi-billion dollar power conversion market.
This approach, IPC says, improves efficiency, installation and manufacturing costs. IPC’s initial focus is on photovoltaic, grid storage, and electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure applications.
IPC’s 30 kW battery converter weighs 97 lbs., less than the weight of conventional bi-directional battery chargers, according to the company. It is wall-mountable, reducing shipping and installation costs by up to 90 percent. It is built on the same universal power converter platform as the company’s initial PV inverter product.
According to IPC, the battery converter provides greater than 96 percent charging and inverter efficiency on average.
Grid storage battery converters often operate at low-rated power, says Bill Alexander, IPC chief technical officer. He says the IPC battery converter delivers 95 percent efficiency at 10 percent of rated power, compared to 85-88 percent efficiency for conventional charger/inverter systems, which can reduce battery costs by about 7 percent and electric energy operational costs by about 14 percent.
The battery converter provides bi-directional power conversion over a full power DC range from 500 to 1000V DC, and with 60Amp DC limit down to 200V DC. It also provides isolation between the battery system and the grounded 480V AC grid without the need for either an internal or external transformer.
It is suitable for interfacing a wide variety of battery systems to the grid including new and used electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries.
In late 2012, the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory successfully demonstrated vehicle to grid (V2G) capabilities using Ideal Power Converters’ bi-directional battery converter.