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Cadenza: novel battery project at NYPA to demonstrate energy storage’s role in advancing NY State’s clean energy goals

Located at the New York Power Authority (NYPA) in White Plains and funded in part by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the battery technology was developed by Cadenza Innovation Inc., Wilton, Connecticut, United States, to showcase energy storage’s role in enhancing demand management and grid flexibility and will help advance New York State’s nation-leading climate and clean energy goals.

For lithium to still lead the way…

“Lithium-ion is the hero of the storage industry. And it can be amazingly reliable and really, really good if you package it right,” Cadenza Innovation CEO and founder Christina Lampe-Onnerud says. There is, however, a debate still to be had about what that packaging should entail, and nowhere does this problem come into starker relief than when it comes to the question of safety.

New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium 10 Year Anniversary

In 2010 NY-BEST was established as a non-profit organization to support the Battery and Energy Storage Ecosystem in the state of New York.

Could utilities’ costly battery storage plans provide backup electricity — and savings?

The New York Power Authority is using batteries designed by Cadenza Innovation, which has offices in Wilton and Danbury and a test lab in Oxford. Cadenza CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Energy Technologies.

5 Lessons From the Battery Fire Investigations

It’s been over a year since the McMicken battery facility in Surprise, Arizona began to smoke and eventually exploded. We’ve learned a lot since then. I spent the last several weeks digging through a series of investigations, tracing what happened, why safety systems failed, how designs should change and what approaches can better protect firefighters. (You can read those analyses here, here and here.)

Choice of lithium iron phosphate not a ‘silver bullet solution’ for safety

Cadenza Innovation has developed a lithium ion ‘Supercell’ architecture that the company claims can prevent a cell that has gone into thermal runaway from propagating and spreading fire into adjoining cells – with the company recently receiving UL 9540 A certification that appears to back up the claim. According to the CEO, that was done using cells with “the highest nickel content,” and the battery design architecture is agnostic to whether LFP or NMC is used. In other words, Lampe Onnerud said, it does not matter which cell type is used, as much as the control strategy for using it safely, but the choice LFP is increasingly being “spun as a silver bullet solution” to the thermal runaway problem.

Wilton battery innovator is core of NY energy storage demo

Addressing the global demand for batteries that don’t catch on fire, Wilton-based Cadenza Innovation announced its patented “supercell” lithium-ion battery technology has just achieved compliance with one of the world’s most rigorous safety evaluations, UL9540A.

Result from UL testing ‘proves’ innovative battery platform can stop thermal runaway propagation

Cadenza, founded by Onnerud in 2012, has developed a battery architecture and manufacturing platform that aims to cost-effectively eliminate one of the biggest issues facing the grid storage industry today. As seen in fires at energy storage system (ESS) facilities in South Korea, China and in Arizona, one cell catching fire can cause enormous damage as fire propagation causes it to cascade from cell to cell. The company announced yesterday that its battery cells have been proven to stop propagation when thermal runaway is induced, having gone through UL9540A testing methodology. Under that testing, battery cells are “artificially” made to burn.

8 Steps Towards a Sustainable Economic Recovery

There has been much discussion over the past few years about the ‘energy transition’. The underlying premise is that the transition to lower and zero-carbon energy sources should be accelerated to mitigate the impact of global warming. The current pandemic is shining additional light on global inter-connectivity and the need to collaborate and share best practices.

Listen: Battery technology to play an important part of broader energy transition

Battery technology for electric vehicles and energy storage will play an important part of the broader energy transition. Key topics include understanding cost trends and competitiveness of these technologies and challenges ahead for alternative storage technologies.

Roman Kramarchuk, head of energy scenarios, policy and technology analytics at S&P Global Platts, talks with Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Cadenza Innovation.