Proactive Maintenance for Lead Acid Battery Energy Storage System in Life Cycle

With the increasing penetration of clean energy in power grid, lead-acid battery (LAB), as a mature, cheap and safe energy storage technology, has been widely used in load dispatching and energy trading. Because of the long-term partial state of charge operation in the LAB energy storage system, the irreversible sulfation problem seriously restricts the efficient and safe operation of the system. A proactive maintenance concept in life cycle based on the capacitive nature of the sulfation is introduced in this paper to determine the resonance frequency of sulfation LAB as the diagnostic support. The resonance excitation achieves an average of 23% impedance restoration on tested LABs within 2 hours. Furthermore, based on the life cycle theory, it is estimated that the proposed proactive maintenance concept can save 3.228 tons of equivalent lead leakage for a 500kW LAB energy storage system in one year. The proactive maintenance concept in life cycle proposed in this paper provides an important technical support for the development of efficient, economical and environmental friendly LAB energy storage system, and provides a new way for the sustainable development of LAB industry.