Inspiration born in the battery room; battery management

Imagine a series of 13,760 NiCad energy modules connected in series to create one big 5,000-VDC battery that provides 27 MW of AC current.  This system is what guarantees uninterrupted power in the face of Fairbanks, Alaska’s unpredictable weather conditions. Harold Vanasse uses this extreme example of battery management to illustrate the potential housed in every lift truck battery room in the U.S.

As VP of sales and marketing for Philadelphia Scientific, you might expect him to use over-the-top examples to make a point about his product. But Vanasse uses this example more to inspire than to sell. Today’s battery rooms have quite a way to go before companies can start harnessing their battery power for anything other than their lift trucks. That’s because there’s a shortage of lean thinking.

“It’s astounding the amount of money at risk due to a lack of lean thought processes in the battery room,” he told me. “A lot of battery rooms have more batteries than they need. You can get leaner but the price you have to pay for that is to have the right management tools.”

Consider that a typical 24 volt battery costs between $2000 and $3000. A 36 volt is $4,000-$5,000. If these batteries don’t deliver the required lift truck run times, those costs and all that energy are wasted.

DCs have done a great job trimming energy costs with more efficient lighting, but the battery room represents the next big opportunity. Just choosing the right time of day to charge batteries can make a big difference, according to Vanasse.

“It doesn’t make sense to charge batteries when it’s very expensive if you can charge them off-peak, store that energy and then use it during the peak times,” he says. “The information we collect with the iBOS System allows us to understand usage. It might mean buying more batteries to store that energy but it might also mean you could use that energy correctly and wisely.”

Batteries are designed for a specific number of cycles, and they’re designed to last five years. But that only happens if they’re charged, discharged and cooled down. If they’re not used, they corrode. What’s missing is the lean philosophy of using resources wisely.

“Left to their own devices lift truck operators don’t know which battery to use,” Vanasse believes. “So they will take the most convenient ones, which means they’ll use the same batteries over and over. If they use those cycles up quickly and don’t allow the battery to fully charge and cool down, those batteries won’t last.”

A battery management system will tell users which battery is charged and available for them. It will also indicate if the user has the right number of batteries in the battery room.

Once the lean philosophy is applied as well in the battery room as it is in the distribution center, Vanasse believes even greater things will be possible—like what they’re doing with batteries in Alaska.

In fact, why not use battery rooms as part of this nation’s Smart Grid? Pour some of your surplus energy back into the Grid and turn your energy meter backwards. That’s a great goal, but lift truck battery management has to be conquered first. Are your batteries even being watered correctly? It takes time and discipline to do that. If you’re not there yet, maybe adopting a single-point watering system would help. Watering a normal battery usually takes about a minute per cell, or 15 minutes total. With a single point system it takes 15-30 seconds. That’s lean thinking.

Today the battery room; tomorrow, the Grid.

Tom Andel
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