During bushfires power is often lost to many areas and sometimes is not returned for days or weeks at a time. At these times communities often have to rely on generators, especially if, as in the devastating 2019-2020 Australian bushfires roads are cut off to complete communities for extended periods of time.
Strong winds also tend to bring trees down on power lines, again cutting off your power supply
With the installation of energy storage systems most people look at the battery and concentrate on that but in reality the battery inverter is an integral part of any energy storage system and will dictate much of the energy storage systems operations.
Often when an energy storage system isn’t working properly the fault lies with the inverter and not the battery.
Inverter power is measured in kVA or volt amps.
The battery inverter takes power from the solar PV array (solar inverter or MPPT) and battery which can be of different voltages and converts it to 240V for household of business use.
Solar inverters are designed to work with solar PV arrays and battery inverters are designed to work with energy storage batteries. Hybrid inverters are also coming onto the market that combine both solar PV and battery conversions.
The SoNick or molten salt batteries have an operating range of -20° to +60°C which makes them a much better alternative to other batteries.
In Australia, we have extreme weather conditions and even in a garage in suburbia, a common place for housing a battery, the temperature can often exceed 40°C.
The SoNick batteries are the only batteries that will really work in temperatures over 40°C without having any detrimental effect to the batteries longevity. Although other batteries claim to be able to operate at the 40°C mark, they will deteriorate when operating around this temperature and will have a much reduced lifetime.
The wide temperature range of operation makes it a perfect battery for hot remote areas or areas that are bushfire prone. Other batteries stop working at around 40°C whereas the Sodium Nickel Chloride battery continues to work to at least 60°C and doesn’t need cooling. For example the lithium ion batteries that are currently receiving a lot of market attention from Tesla, only have an operating range of around 5 – 35°C, which means they will not operate on many hot days in Australia and even on cooler days if they are not housed in a cool enough environment.
