INTERVIEW: ED SHAFFER, ADVANCED BATTERY CONCEPTS Just a year after winning BCI’s Innovation Award for a new ESS product, Advanced Battery Concepts is ushering another into the market. Ed Shaffer talks to John Shepherd about his firm’s latest invention, ABC’s overall mission and the importance of…
Thinking outside the box
“In 2023 we are going to be installing these BOX-BE systems in the field to demonstrate what we say and know they can do” The good news for Advanced Battery Concepts came just as this magazine went to press. ABC and Indian battery giant Exide Industries had agreed to work together in a potential landmark deal for the industry and the region. The firms plan to commercialize — manufacture and sell — ABC’s BOXBE battery energy storage systems in the Indian marketplace. Although the agreement is a nonbinding letter of intent, it is yet another validation of the potential bipolar batteries have in disrupting the existing market landscape. It’s also a vindication of the persistence and determination of ABC’s founder Ed Shaffer who set up the company in 2008. The firm first came to prominence in 2017 with the first
70 • Batteries International • Autumn 2022
allocation of licences for the then new bipolar GreenSeal battery technology. But more about that later. Less than a year after launching the company’s HEES Home Energy Storage System — powered by its patented GreenSeal bi-polar battery technology and winner of BCI’s 2022 Innovation Award — the focus of Shaffer and his team is now on a new product. ‘BOX-BE’ (Box of Bipolar Energy), says Shaffer, is invented to meet the need for responsible energy storage and with proven lead battery technology under the hood. The updated battery chemistry has its foundations in GreenSeal, which was the brand that was the flagbearer of ABC’s bipolar battery licensing program launched in 2017.
“We’re still maintaining and supporting that business and supplying GreenSeal to the lead battery industry, but today, the majority of our focus is on using our EverGreenSeal technology as we expand into the energy storage space,” Shaffer says. BOX-BE enables ABC to expand its position as an energy storage supplier, with the units referred to as ‘bays’ — fully-contained, sealed and secure enclosures comprising the batteries, safety systems, the electrical systems and the BMS. The bays can be connected in parallel and this is where the focus of the company’s marketing lies at present. In the US, the system meets the initial requirements for installers and developers to apply for tax credits under the US Clean Energy Inflation Reduction Act and ABC was focused exclusively on the US market for BOX-BE. But not for long. “We’re not big enough to go global but we are talking to potential partners to take it not just to India, but Asia and Europe,” Shaffer says. “We’re already doing the outreach but it’s still early in the process. We’re building the business against supply agreements.” The new product is still being tested internally. Shaffer says: “In 2023 we are going to be installing these systems in the field to demonstrate what we say and know they can do.” Shaffer says he already has advance orders that will soon be readied for dispatch to customers across the US. ABC expects to deploy about 10 of its new progeny in the new year. “We already have projects lined up for those,” he says. The first supply agreement is targeting a commercialization date of 2025, allowing time to secure interconnector agreement approvals. “By getting BOX-BE into the field next year we can then start to get the performance data that we need to build a plant and then our projections are looking toward gigawatthours of BOX-BE sales in 2025, he says.”
www.batteriesinternational.com