Fuse protection for Electrical Energy Storage with Several Strings in Parallel

As the renewable energy market expands recently, safety of the EES application is becoming a major focus. Smart monitoring systems have allowed mitigating catastrophic failure of EES installations however fuses and contactor remain one of the safest protection solutions once everything else has failed. Today’s EES installers face the challenge of operating voltages of up to 1500 VDC with available fault currents larger than few 100 kA. Toward reaching the level of power/energy per container, paralleling battery strings will bring container fault currents to large levels. While this level of fault currents is not an issue for fuse, nonetheless, the risk is that the other battery will start to feed energy to the arcing inside the fuse and over-stresses it. The safety and growth of EES applications are now started to happen thanks to introduction of fuses specially designed for EES applications along with variety of applications notes on proper fuse selection complimented by test labs simulating actual EES fault currents. and development of new IEC standards for battery usage.