r/EnergyStorage

Australia has had huge success with its « Cheaper Home Batteries Program » with homeowners snapping up batteries, leading to dramatic reductions in wholesale energy prices as peak grid demand has fallen.

Now Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, is proposing to extend generous incentives to businesses and apartments that cut up front costs by up to 40% for battery storage systems between 20 kWh and 30 MWh, with the most generous benefits for businesses that also install solar.

Great to see Australia continue to lead the way on distributed solar and batteries.

Curious for experience using AC blocks with string inverters for BESS projects requiring Black start functionality. Anyone have experience?

Hey everyone,

I’m the founder of a DC-based company working on modular energy storage systems packaged in standard 20-ft containers. The system delivers clean power + heavy-duty cooling with heat recovery, designed for dual-use (defense + commercial/data center) applications under BAA/DFARS.

I’ve been reaching out to a long list of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio contract manufacturers, fabricators, and related suppliers.

The response rate has been extremely low. Most messages (email and LinkedIn) go unanswered. In the few cases where there’s interest, the conversation often stalls around NDAs or next steps.

I’m specifically looking for partners who can support domestic manufacturing of these containerized systems (or major subsystems), preferably with experience in fluids/electromechanical work.

A few questions for the community:

1. Is this level of non-response normal right now for manufacturing outreach in the VA/MD region, or am I approaching it wrong?
2. Any advice on getting past the “no reply” wall — better channels, timing, or messaging?
3. Does anyone have experience working with (or introductions to) manufacturers?
4. Any tips on navigating NDA discussions with smaller manufacturers who may be cautious?

Happy to share more technical details under NDA if someone is genuinely interested in exploring a partnership or has a relevant contact.

Thanks in advance for any advice or pointers.

Battery adoption is on the rise and prices are dropping but this backlog is putting a damper on momentum. What ideas and solutions are out there to mitigate this and speed up the process?

Battery Manufacturer Sales Opportunity
Hey all,

We’re a battery manufacturer looking for people throughout the United States (Puerto Rico included!) who are interested in getting into battery and energy storage sales.

You don’t need previous battery or solar experience. We can train you on the product and industry. What matters more is being comfortable talking to people, generating interest, and finding opportunities.

A couple things that might make this interesting:

You’re selling direct for the manufacturer, not working for a solar installer or knocking doors for somebody else’s company. There are opportunities to sell through homeowners, solar installers, contractors, distributors, and other channels.

It’s also a good way to get experience in the rapidly growing battery and energy storage industry without needing years of solar experience beforehand.

We’re actively building out our sales network, so there’s room for people who perform well to take on larger territories, build their own sales channels, or move into leadership as we grow.

We’ll provide product training and support. You bring the ability to sell and develop relationships.
If this sounds interesting, shoot me a DM and we can talk details.

Federal tax credits for residential storage expired at the end of last year, prompting record sales in Q4 of 2025 — and then sales climbed even higher in the first quarter of 2026, per a BloombergNEF analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

Hi there!

I have a very basic understanding og electrical systems. I trust myself to solder basic things and use standard basic connectors, but thats about it.

I am looking at aquiring a few battery modules and an inverter from the Solax brand for a new project. All the units are pre owned and I need to test them asap after purchase.

How do I best go about doing this? Preferably with the use of 1-phase power socket, but I understand that this might not be possible.

Inverter: x3-15.0p-t-d

Batterypacks (two units): hv10063

Also, for the the actual install I will aquire the help of professionals since I understand that its a high voltage system and I want my insurance to cover.

Thank you!

What a bipolar cell is. Instead of discrete cells wired in series with tabs and busbars, you coat the cathode on one side of a current collector plate and the anode on the other, then stack N of these plates. The series connection happens through the plate itself. You save tab mass, interconnect resistance, and packaging volume, and you can pick your stack voltage by picking N. That's the whole trick, and it's a good one.

Why bipolar does not require a solid electrolyte. Bipolar is an architecture. The electrolyte state is a separate variable. Proof by production hardware: Toyota has been shipping bipolar NiMH as the traction battery of the Aqua since mid-2021, built with Toyota Industries at the Kyowa and Ishihama plants, tens of thousands of packs per month. NiMH is an aqueous system, roughly 6 M KOH. A liquid, and a nastily creepy one at that. Toyota's next step is bipolar LFP, the "popularization" battery on their 2026-2027 BEV roadmap, again a conventional liquid-electrolyte lithium chemistry, plus a bipolar high-nickel variant for 2027-2028. And the concept is old: bipolar lead-acid goes back to the 1920s, and bipolar Li-ion with a standard LiPF6 carbonate electrolyte was patented in 1997.

• Toyota Industries, bipolar NiMH for Aqua: https://www.toyota-industries.com/products/automobile/batteries/index.html
• Toyota battery roadmap, bipolar LFP 2026-2027: https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/39330500.html
• Bipolar Li-ion with liquid carbonate electrolyte, US5595839 (1997): https://patents.google.com/patent/US5595839A
• Review on bipolar sodium-ion, incl. history from 1923 Pb-acid onward: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352152X23005364
• Sakuu showing Munro physical bipolar lithium-metal stacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZhKqpleAXM
• Good general explainer: https://www.batterydesign.net/chemistry/bipolar-battery/

The actual hard problem in bipolar has never been "the electrolyte is liquid." It is that every layer must be ionically isolated from its neighbours. Any shared electrolyte path around the edge of a plate is a shunt across a series junction: self-discharge plus plate corrosion. The fix is a sealed frame around the perimeter of every layer, which is why most of the bipolar patent literature is sealing patents (see e.g. CEA's US10497941). A solid electrolyte makes sealing easier because nothing wicks. Easier, not uniquely possible. A semi-solid or gel design sits in exactly the same category. So "our cells are bipolar, therefore solid-state" is an argument that Toyota's KOH-soaked Aqua pack disproves at a rate of 40,000 units a month.

The part nobody demos on a bench: balancing. A bipolar stack is a series string. Physics doesn't care whether the series connection runs through a busbar or through a shared collector plate: the current through every layer is identical either way, and the reasons cells drift apart are identical too. Differential self-discharge, differential coulombic efficiency, and capacity spread turning equal Ah throughput into unequal ΔSOC. These accumulate in one direction with no restoring force.

In a normal lithium pack the BMS handles this. Every series element gets a voltage sense lead, and a balancing circuit bleeds charge off the high cells, typically some tens to hundreds of mA. Now try that inside a bipolar stack. Every sense lead and every balancing conductor is a feedthrough breaching the perimeter seal, which was the hard part of the design to begin with. Sensing is arguably manageable, a sense lead carries microamps and could be a thin foil extension of the plate. But balancing needs real current through a real conductor with real dissipation, per layer, inside the stack. At that point you have rebuilt a module BMS in the least accessible location imaginable and thrown away most of the packaging win you built the thing for.

Why NiMH gets away without any of this. NiMH has a built-in chemical balancer. On overcharge, the positive electrode evolves oxygen, which diffuses to the negative and recombines. The excess current turns into heat instead of voltage rise, so a layer that gets ahead clamps itself and the string equalises automatically. Lead-acid has an equivalent gassing shunt. This is precisely why Toyota commercialised bipolar NiMH first: you can treat the whole stack as one monolithic cell, monitor only the terminals, and the chemistry forgives you.

Lithium has no such sink. Overcharge in a lithium cell is not self-limiting, it's destructive. And before anyone points out that Donut says their battery contains no lithium: sodium-ion has exactly the same problem. No overcharge recombination mechanism, no chemical self-balancing, same one-way drift, same destructive endpoint. Whatever intercalation chemistry you pick, a monolithic bipolar stack without per-layer access is a series string that is simultaneously unbalanceable and unobservable. On a flat-plateau chemistry, one layer can quietly walk toward overcharge while the terminal voltage of the stack looks perfectly normal. I have no idea how SAKUU solved this as they use some lithium metal chemistry.

So the interesting question was never "can you make three cells read three voltages." The question is what happens to layer-to-layer drift over the claimed 100,000 cycles in a chemistry with no chemical overcharge sink and no published balancing scheme. Either the layers are tapped, in which case "one cell, any voltage" is doing some heavy lifting as a description, or they aren't, and then the cycle-life claim needs an explanation nobody has offered yet.

Can someone help me understand the difference between a battery energy storage system and an uninterrupted Power System?
Both use batteries and do the work of providing electricity in case power from the grids go off and act as a back-up...
then what exactly is the difference??

I had a discussion with an installer for solar batteries today. One of them mentioned that there was potentially an issue with Sig Energy batteries causing house fires.

I was just wondering if anyone had heard the same about these sort of issues?

A few months back, we received our Tesla 3 Powerwall through PG&E’s Residential Storage Initiative (RSI). It was a great experience. Today I received an email saying the current Demand Response program we are enrolled in, as a requirement of the RSI program, is no longer available.

As part of our RSI agreement, customers must participate in a utility‑approved demand response (DR) program. As an alternative, PG&E and Tesla have worked together to offer a new program we may enroll in and fulfill our demand response requirement, Tesla’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP A.4.).

For someone like us who are part of the PG&E’s Residential Storage Initiative (RSI), what the best rate plan to select? We are in the SF Bay Area and frequently lose power, so I currently have the PW3 set to 80% reserve and we have no solar.

I'd love to hear people's thoughts and experiences who are in a similar situation. Have you received the Tesla’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP A.4.) email? What rate plan are you using?

I’m completely new to energy storage and trying to understand the bigger picture.

What do you guys think will drive the next stage of growth? Like renewable integration, grid reliability or something else Ig?

Appreciate to hear how people in this field see!