The supercapacitors are electricity storage devices which are widely used in multitudes of consumer electronics applications, such as, for example, delivery of power to photographic flashes. At the present day, due to advantageous characteristics, they became a compelling alternative to lead acid or lithium batteries commonly used in solar installations for self-consumption with compatible Imeon inverters.
Supercapacitors allow energy to be stored in the form of an electrostatic field. This is different from how a conventional battery works, where the electrical energy must be converted into chemical energy in order to be stored and it has intriguing implications. Primarily the rapidity of charge and discharge of a supercapacitor, since it’s no longer restricted by the speed of the abovementioned conversion, is much higher than in case of a battery. In practice this means that supercapacitors can support higher charge and discharge currents. Moreover, the conversion losses, which depending on the battery’s electrolyte can vary from tolerable to substantial, are removed from equation thus making this storage more energy efficient. And finally, since during use the supercapacitors are not as prone to deterioration as electrolyte, the storage can withstand rough ambient conditions and many more charge – discharge cycles than a modern lithium battery. According to the manufacturers of solar supercapacitor storage devices their products can support up to one million cycles which would mean that even assuming multiple cycles per day the supercapacitor storage will still continue its operation after centuries.
Next to that supercapacitor storage presents several advantages which facilitate operation and handling, namely, it is always possible to recharge a completely discharged battery while both lithium and lead acid batteries can be discharged to a “point of no return”, it has little to none self-discharge, which means that they can be stored for long periods of time without recharging which is not the case for the batteries, and it can be safely transported without any specific precautions. As is the case with most products, superior specification comes at a cost and a kWh of supercapacitor storage is naturally more expensive than a battery equivalent.
Imeon Energy has developed a unique specific software application for supercapacitor storage manufactured by Kilowatt Labs. The application is accessible through OS. ONE, the world’s first software operating system for solar inverters available only for Imeon products. Contact us at Imeon Energy for more details.
