Vaulta: Brisbane-Made Batteries With A Twist

A battery enclosure doesn’t sound like something that could change a market, but that’s what Dominic Spooner, founder and CEO of Brisbane-based company Vaulta hopes to do.

Vaulta offers the world a battery enclosure – with a difference: it can be disassembled right down to the individual battery cells without special tools or expertise.

And that means a lithium battery, for example, can be made repairable and much more easily recyclable.

Speaking to SolarQuotes, Spooner explained, he began understanding batteries and how they are put together because he was tasked with making batteries repairable in a previous job as a battery designer.

There are good reasons for an easily repairable battery: a failure might be down to a single cell, a cable failure, a connector failure, a dry solder joint in the battery management system circuit board, or more.

In a typical lithium battery, that means replacing the whole unit.

Once components go into a traditional battery pack, they’re never coming out:

“you’re relying on the whole battery lasting the duration.

We believe you need to be able to access the battery cells if there’s a failure. With our cases, there are no screws, no glues, and no welds,”

Spooner told SolarQuotes.

“That makes it possible to re-access the batteries once they go into the package”.

“If something that might cost $5 to replace cannot be replaced, and that will render the battery as end-of-life.”

Handling the failed battery is its own saga:

“you might have 200kg worth of stuff – who pays for the dangerous goods freight? What of all the non-dangerous goods in the package, all the plastics, all the metals? You end up paying dangerous goods freight rates on that stuff.”

If the battery can be easily disassembled,

“only stuff that needs to go to the end-of-life facility has to go, without carrying everything along for the ride”.

That, Spooner said, takes a battery much closer to being part of a circular economy.

He said the approach is attracting interest from battery vendors, although to date, negotiations are in confidence.

Vaulta’s Batteries

The company is also manufacturing complete batteries under its name, like this one, a 48V, 14.36kWh unit that offers a decent warranty – 3000 cycles equates to 43MWh delivered.

Warranty considerations are another reason to make a battery repairable, Spooner said.

“That’s built into our pricing model – we know we can replace a cell, a cable, the battery management system, a connector – not the entire item.

We can send finished goods with packages of critical spares. And furthermore, the current design is built in a simplistic manner without special tools”.

That, he said, means that local licensed electricians would be able to learn to repair the batteries.

That could be critical in remote locations:

“you can have it back up and running quicker without ultra-trained specially skilled service technicians. We can bring regions that aren’t part of the renewable transition, we can bring them along for the ride and get people trained.”

Australian Components

In keeping with the desire to have everything in the battery repairable, Spooner said, every component of the Vaulta battery that can be manufactured in Australia is built here.

The BMS, for example, is built in Brisbane, meaning Vaulta could work with the vendor to get the capabilities Spooner wanted.

“The BMS is 100% configurable to suit different inverter protocols,

We’ve been able to integrate inverters, with minimal contact with the inverter company, because we can adjust the protocols to suit the inverter.”

While Spooner wasn’t willing to disclose the shipped price of Vaulta’s batteries – it’s early days in terms of shipments – he said the company’s target is $600-$700 per kWh.

The speed of assembly of the Vaulta batteries is demonstrated in this short video:

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Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/vaulta-batteries/