Page 26: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2017)

oices the (battery) power play

Brent

Perry [Founder & MD, PBES] & “The Wealth Factory”

Photo: PBES

BY WILLIAM STOICHEVSKI his is historic, we tell our- able and insurable safety, power man- in Norway’ brand based on Canuck have to produce. His partner-clients — selves, as PBES founder agement and surplus horsepower. lithium thinking is Oslo’s own very re- system operators like Siemens and ABB

Brent Perry walks us around cent idea, proclaimed aloud by Prime — are well established in Trondheim and his still labor-intensive “bat- Industry Firsts Minister Erna Solberg herself. Looking along Norway’s west coast. “They’re

T tery factory” in the heart of “This is a front plate,” Perry says, grip- around, an assembly line of box-covered just down the road” and they’re also key

Norway, from where ship owner capi- ping the shell and circuit board that’ll palettes, tables and busy young men is movers in Oslo’s plan to electrify sever- tal controls half of the world’s offshore hold the brains of a cell module. Inside, just discernable. There’s space to grow. al dozen ferry crossings with all-battery tonnage. Perry, a shipbuilder himself, 24 cells are kept as cool at 15 degrees There are rows of metal shelves and and hybrid vessels. has chosen to house his ? rst production Celsius by specially engineered coolant crates ready to ship. There’s a cluster of “We’re full on business right now un- center here in the haunt of another ship channels and a heat-exchanging mate- battery modules being tested. til end-of-June,” Perry says, adding, “I builder, Selfa Arctic, whose move north rial layer. “Lithium batteries — although Producing this way means Perry’s expect that in the next few weeks we’ll left for Perry a young cadre of college- they have extraordinary performance ca- spending “? ve-times as much” as he will bring in enough contracts to keep us educated workers. pacity — are very temperature-sensitive be when his ordered automation arrives, busy into 2018. We still have the ability

They’ll build PBES’s stackable con- beasts. Most of the world today produces but he’s happy to employ local skills put to run this on two shifts and double our ? gurations of batteries that do not catch air-cooled batteries that live in reality an out of work by the offshore downturn. capacity.” In square feet per dollar, Perry ? re. Lithium cells’ penchant for catching average 40 to 50 percent of their predict- “They’re almost all college educated on admits it’s as effective a business “as a ? re or going into meltdown — so-called ed lifespan because you have no control some level. We like the guys. I like boat- software company”. He’s producing 1 thermal runaway — has been the bane of the ambient temperature that you’re builders.” MWh every week, and with what he has o of an industry, as it struggles to produce working in. Every time you go over 30 he can produce 4,000 batteries a year. a set that withstands the rigors of actual C, you start to seriously erode it.” The Lucrative Growth “Everything coming out of Norway marine use. European environmental au- heat-removal quality of the PBES sys- Perry’s “capacity of capacity” stands until the end of the year is going to be thority tests of “leading” designs showed tems allow a 100-megawatt-hour storage at 43 megawatt hours of energy stor- marine,” Perry says, although word is they were not. Only Perry’s solution — system to provide 300 MW of power. age systems (batteries plus intel). “With he’s just secured an energy storage con- steeped in decades of energy storage Many of the battery’s components are this set up alone we’ll be able to deliver tract for a major windfarm. Batteries thinking from Western Canada’s lithium sourced locally, like so much of this about 120 MWh,” he says. Steady busi- destined for a two-ship order from 2016 battery brain trust — has shown bank- made-in-Norway plant. A new ‘Made ness is already ratcheting up, so he’ll are some of what we see. In a couple of 26 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • APRIL 2017

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