SolarEdge founder and VP for product marketing, Lior Handelsman, says we are using the wrong ruler to measure battery productivity. His company is rapidly making a name for itself with power optimizers, solar inverters and monitoring solutions for photovoltaic arrays. Users don’t want to hear about the number of cycles, he says. They want to know what EV batteries do.
An Outspoken Marketer Discusses What EV Batteries Do
Lior Handelsman is not unknown for being on point. This is especially true since his company took over South Korean high power battery and energy storage system company Kokam, “The way the industry talks about batteries needs to change.” he insists.
The number of cycles of charge and discharge a battery can perform in its lifetime is essentially meaningless to customers. They want to know what EV batteries do operationally. Perhaps this is because Solar Edge plans on making nickel manganese cobalt batteries soon. Nonetheless, we admit to being more interested in how far a tank of gas takes us than dry mile-per-gallon stats.
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Are the Number of Charge / Discharge Cycles a Misleading Term?
Lior certainly believes this is the case. “It’s a misleading term. We need to eliminate the term ‘cycling’ from our industry, in our view. It’s very important, to me,” he told Energy Storage News.
We are inclined to agree a smart customer is more interested in how fast their EV goes and how far on a charge. Furthermore, how long recharging takes is probably more relevant than how many times the battery will stand up to repeating it. The right term that we need to convert the conversation to is “energy throughput”, Lior explains. How much energy can you cycle from your battery?
Hence the two numbers that people need to relate to are “(a) what is your warranty on the battery. And (b) what is the energy throughput from the battery”. But the real comparison is energy throughput in a lifetime, or over time. And you will find interesting things when you know exactly what EV batteries do Lior promises.
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Preview Image: Lior Handelsman on LinkedIn
Video Share Link: https://youtu.be/_RHwKYuN9F8
