This week, Nissan announced that people would be able to place orders for its new xStorage battery, a stationary storage battery for individual homeowners, in September.
The xStorage battery was developed by Nissan's London-based design facility with the help of Eaton, a Dublin-based power management company. Nissan has no plans to sell the battery in the US, instead focusing its efforts on the European market. According to the automaker's press release, the battery will have 4.2 kWh of capacity and will cost approximately £3200 (approximately $4622).
The announcement comes one year after Tesla Motors announced a program to build stationary storage lithium-ion batteries for households, setting off a deluge of pre-orders from around the world. Tesla's batteries are only just now reaching customers, but the company has said that unexpected demand for the 7 kWh batteries has led it to expand how much room the company has devoted to the so-called Powerwalls on the floor of Tesla's Reno, NV-based battery factory.
This new generation of stationary storage batteries has been primarily marketed toward people with solar panels on their houses. The pitch is that a stationary storage system allows users to move away from buying electricity from the power company—a battery can store energy produced by solar panels during the day and deploy that energy in the evening, when the homeowner might have to buy energy from the power company otherwise. Potential customers might also use the batteries for more traditional purposes, keeping them charged in case of an emergency blackout.
Nissan's new battery is supposed to be user-friendly, including a smartphone app that will “allow consumers to flick between energy sources at the touch of a button.” The battery will need to be installed by a third-party, certified installer, much like Tesla's Powerwalls.
Nissan did not go into any details about the chemistry of its batteries or how often they can be cycled. However, Paul Wilcox, the Chairman of Nissan Europe, said in a statement that the xStorage batteries would provide “a sustainable ‘second life’ for Nissan’s electric vehicle (EV) batteries after their first life in cars is over.” Each xStorage battery will contain twelve battery modules from the automakers' electric vehicles.
This is a similar strategy to one that was recently proposed by Daimler for a stationary storage facility as well—after a decade of use, electric vehicle batteries begin to experience some low-level power loss which might be unacceptable in a car but which is negligible in a stationary storage unit.
Nissan and Eaton said that they expect to sell 100,000 batteries in the next five years as demand for stationary storage grows.
Listing image by Nissan
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