The growing demand for energy self-sufficiency is helping Queensland-based battery manufacturer Vaulta deliver the next generation of its lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery packs.
With more than 4 million Australian households having already installed rooftop solar, Vaulta CEO Dominic Spooner said battery energy storage take-up is now increasing with off-grid power solutions gaining increasing prominence.
“Demand for off-grid energy has increased in recent years and we’re expecting to see a further uptick in interest,” he said, adding that the growth market is helping inform the design of its next-generation technology. “Offgrid is a big market for us and we learn a lot from customers in the space because it’s critical power – if it doesn’t work, they don’t have power. It’s a really important space for us.”
Vaulta makes a range of batteries at its Brisbane manufacturing facility, including a 14.36 kWh unit and a 5.12 kWh 48 V residential battery. The units can be scaled up, with Spooner saying “we generally go up to about the 250 kWh space. So that probably taps out at medium-scale commercial.”
The company’s latest development has seen it transition from 5.12 kWh batteries in a standard 19-inch rack mount format to a smaller format that can be oriented upright, laid flat, or placed on its side. The batteries can be scaled from 5 kWh to 20 kWh with up to 23 units installed in parallel using the company’s pack controller.
All of Vaulta’s batteries feature the company’s patented no-weld enclosures that are designed for disassembly, which allows for internal cells to be removed, repaired, recycled and reused, and for new cells to be added as battery technology continues to evolve.
Vaulta is also developing an updated battery management system that Spooner said will take the batteries another step closer to being part of a circular economy, a key focus for the company.
“We’re developing an Internet of Things (IoT) device that’s going to provide a lot of information that comes out of the battery management system,” he said. “As well as utilizing some machine learning around potential predictive failure analytics, we’re really looking to hold all of the battery serial codes inside this device to maintain visibility on where batteries are and to have a clear idea of their state of health.”
Spooner said this will allow the company to track how much more time the batteries have left in the field and then who’s taking the liability and responsibility for them, helping to create a full circular economy for its products.
Launched in 2019, Vaulta has only established a continued revenue in the past 18 months and Spooner estimates the company has already got about 150 battery systems in the field.
The company manufactures about 500 kWh of batteries each month at its Brisbane facility and is aiming to scale up production over the next 12 months, but Spooner acknowledges that ambition faces challenges.
“As a company that’s developing battery energy storage systems in Australia, in a competitive landscape, there’s still quite a lot of challenges as far as building the company and making it continually investable and cash-flow positive in a landscape where there’s a pretty big focus on the lowest cost, cheap imported products,” he said.
Spooner said the federal government’s AUD 22.7 billion ($14.12 billion) Future Made in Australia initiative, that includes AUD 549 million to support the development of battery manufacturing capabilities, is a step in the right direction but added more is needed to sustain onshore manfacturing.
“We’ve seen some grant funding starting to come through from the state and federal government levels but if Australia is really serious about a future Made in Australia policy, there needs to be additional privileges made for companies that can prove that they are doing transformative work in Australia,” he said, calling for local and novel content requirements. “So not just importing components from China and putting them together. I think you need to show that you’ve designed the components that you make and that you’ve done your best to utilize a local supply chain where possible.”
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