CleanTechnica D/D1/国际能源技术 D1

发布：2026-06-05 · 事件：2026-06-05

June 2, 2026 7 seconds Jake Richardson 0 Comments Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe . The Michigan-based battery energy storage technology startup Volt Harbor h...

June 2, 2026 7 seconds Jake Richardson 0 Comments Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe . The Michigan-based battery energy storage technology startup Volt Harbor has raised $2 million in seed money . The company makes a modular, software-defined energy storage platform for data centers and the grid. Volt Harbor’s technology works with EV batteries, which are in abundant supply and are growing in quantity. When electric vehicle battery packs can no longer be used for operating electric vehicles, they still have quite a bit of energy capacity remaining to be utilized for second-life stationary energy storage purposes. As far back as ten years ago, some used Nissan LEAF batteries were re-purposed for use in a French data center. Since then, there has been an explosion in EV manufacturing and sales. Consequently, the number of used EV batteries available has grown tremendously. Dr. Al-Thaddeus Avestruz, President, CEO, and co-founder of Volt Harbor, answered some questions for CleanTechnica . How does your technology work more efficiently with converters? Conventional battery energy storage systems process 100% of the energy that comes out of the batteries. That works, but converters are expensive, and they waste energy every time power flows through them. So the larger or the more converters you have, the more cost and inefficiency build up across the system. We mathematically modeled the variation observed across used and mixed batteries. Some packs are weaker, some are stronger, some have different chemistries. We found that you don’t need to process all of the power from the battery. You need the right converters in the right places, along with the right software architecture — our patented Media Access Control (MAC) approach — to let battery modules from different manufacturers share with small power converters  coordinating power flow through the system in real time. We use fewer converters often arranged in two coordinated layers: a small number of higher-power converters handle the average mismatches across groups of batteries, and a larger number of smaller, lower-cost converters handle the residual individual variations. The exemplary result, validated in peer-reviewed research, is 94% energy utilization compared to about 78% for conventional partial-power processing and 23% for full-power (100%) processing: meaning more of the battery’s actual energy reaches the application, with significantly lower hardware costs. In addition, our architecture creates AC directly from the batteries. This eliminates inefficiency and cost of a DC-AC PCS (inverter Power Conversion System) conversion step. Overall, our system has 10-20% the cost of power conversion compared to conventional systems. What capacity is your pilot energy storage system with DTE Energy? Our initial pilot system with DTE is a 100 kW / 300 kWh deployment designed to buffer high-power EV charging events and demonstrate the platform’s multi-use capabilities, including demand response, peak shaving, and backup support. While the demonstration size reflects the goals of the Emerging Technology Fund partnership, the MAC-BESS™ architecture is engineered to scale modularly, from compact commercial deployments to multi-megawatt utility-scale systems. What are the advantages your energy storage system has? A few that matter most for grid and commercial operators: Lower total system cost. Because the architecture uses fewer power converters, capital costs are materially lower than those of conventional BESS approaches, particularly important for cost-sensitive utility-scale and C&I deployments. For second-life applications specifically, we deliver storage at roughly one-half to one-third the cost of new battery systems with equivalent capability. Battery-source flexibility. Our software-defined energy systems tolerate heterogeneity at the power-electronics layer, enabling us to integrate battery modules from multiple OEMs and chemistries — lithium-ion, LFP, NMC, sodium-ion, etc. — into the same system. That eliminates the need to sort and homogenize incoming battery supply, which is typically the most expensive part of running a second-life operation. Extended battery life. Our software-defined battery management approach can extend usable battery life by up to 30% compared to conventional approaches, further improving project economics. Sub-100-microsecond response time. That’s fast enough to ride through grid disturbances that would otherwise trigger backup generation: important for data center and critical-load applications. Reliability comparable to aerospace and commercial aviation. Single parts-per-million failure rates and no single point of failure, because the architecture is distributed across modules rather than dependent on a single controller, converter, or battery.  Each field-replaceable unit is hot-swappable with no interruption of operation. Modular scaling. The same building blocks scale from commerc