Handbook of Energy Storage for Transmission or ... - W2agz.com

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2.2. Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.
SEI is a major supplier to the electric power industry with 8,500 employees and nearly
$7B in annual sales. Since 1985, SEI has researched and developed the VRB, and has
fielded a number of demonstration systems in Japan.
SEI markets its VRB products worldwide and has commercial sales of MW-scale systems
in Japan. In North America, SEI's products are marketed exclusively by Reliable Power
Inc. (Arlington, Virginia). SEI intends to establish a VRB manufacturing company in
North America as the demand for VRB systems increases.
Various demonstration and commercial projects (Table 1) serve to establish the viability
of the technology in a variety of applications and operating modes. While incremental
improvements to the technology are anticipated, the basic research is complete, and
efforts will be focused on product development and manufacturing.
Multiple cell stack designs have been and will be manufactured by SEI to meet a variety
of application requirements. One such design, provided to Vantech for the Stellenbosch
project, incorporated 100 cells in series, is rated at 42 kW continuous (130 kW peak), has
dimensions of 1.2m (L) x 0.9m (W) x 1.1m (H), and a weight of 1,400 kg. Other projects
in Japan incorporated stacks with ratings of 20 kW and 50 kW.
Table 1
SEI Project Experience
Location Application Ratings Operation
Sumitomo Densetsu Co., Ltd. Peak shaving 100 kW / 8h Feb 2000
The Institute of
Applied Energy
Tottori SANYO
Electric Co., Ltd.
Stabilization of wind
turbine output
Power quality (voltage sag
compensation) and peak shaving
170kW / 6h Mar 2001
1500kW / 1h
(3000 kW
instantaneous)
Apr 2001
Obayashi Corp. Solar PV storage (DC only) 30kW / 8h Apr 2001
Kwansei Gakuin University Peak shaving 500kW / 10h Jul 200l
(Italy) CESI Peak shaving 42kW / 2h Nov 2001
Vanadium Redox Battery 16