Urban electricity announced this week that their rechargeable alkaline battery technology has been installed at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) in UC San Diego, replacing 20,000 pounds of toxic lead-acid batteries with a solution. a safer, eco-friendly, cost-effective alternative and more than doubles the available backup power of the battery.
SDSC has been an international leader in high-performance and data-intensive computing since its founding in 1985, with support from the National Science Foundation. SDSC organizes research compute loads for the local campus, other UC campuses, and a number of research associates, both regionally and nationally, who work on social impact topics , including climate change and genes.
The massive computing clusters and petabytes of storage needed for this job will now get backup power from modern energy storage systems based on a familiar idea: rechargeable alkaline batteries again.
As part of the San Diego Supercomputing Center’s new power backup system, recently installed rechargeable alkalines cost less than half the price of equivalent lithium-ion batteries while not requiring to the fire suppression system. Image credit: UCSD
“This project has transformed the data center paradigm,” said Christine Kirkpatrick, SDSC Research Data Services director and secretary general of the International Scientific Council Data Committee (CODATA). our material for resilience.
Kirkpatrick’s division provides everything a researcher might need, including storing, searching, sharing, and reusing data. The critical computational loads are supported by generators and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). As SDSC’s computing capabilities have grown, that protection cannot be extended to all customers because generators cannot be extended due to California’s environmental regulations.
“A large portion of our racks only have traditional lead-acid UPS coverage that can last 27 minutes during a power outage. Some parts of our data center are only powered on the road and shut down immediately when the grid goes down. Urban Electric Power technology is a game changer. We can now offer hours instead of minutes to UPS customers, and with the next phase of installation we hope to expand battery backup to street customers ,” said Kirkpatrick. “SDSC is the world’s first enterprise application of this innovative rechargeable battery technology, and our partnership with Urban Electric Power has made our computing footprint greener.”
Urban Electric Power has brought new life to centuries-old zinc manganese-dioxide cell technology – the chemistry of familiar household AA alkaline batteries – with a patented method that can be recharged for 10 years or more. go up. That’s 50 times longer than when Ford Motors first tried recharging the alkalines.
There were 5,200 individual alkaline cells in SDSC’s initial installation, storing one megawatt-hour of power and replacing a range of lead-acid batteries that are currently being recycled. An additional 5,200 cells in phase 2 of similar size will be operational this summer at the UC San Diego site.
A team invented Urban Electric Power’s patented battery technology at the City University of New York led by Professor Sanjoy Banerjee, now the company’s CEO. To make it rechargeable, they figured out how to doped a manganese-zinc oxide alkaline battery with copper, bismuth and other components. An exclusive separator between the cathode allows for repeated recharging without degradation as the battery cycles.
The resulting products for home, commercial and grid-scale use are currently being manufactured in Pearl River, New York, from commonly available materials. Rechargeable alkalines cost less than half the price of comparable lithium-ion batteries while avoiding the need for a fire suppression system that requires additional space and costs.
The technology has been UL certified as fire safe because it doesn’t rely on lithium-ion’s tendency to refuel hot, difficult-to-extinguish fires, a problem known as thermal runaway. As happened in San Diego, it cuts down on lead use, a notorious environmental hazard that leaves one in three children worldwide with lead poisoning.
“We are solving an insidious problem facing the current battery industry worldwide because lead is toxic to the process,” said Ann Marie Augustus, Vice President of Urban Electric Power. production, recycling and disposal”.
The source: UCSD
