Page 27: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2017)

weeks, the order for a ferry company inspect in their pre-audits of his factory his plant. From the system integrators’ they turn around and package it out and will be assembled and tested. There are processes. In fact, it’s the details that point-of-view, the battery systems rep- sell it the way they want to.” 80 to 90 batteries aboard a typical fer- make the PBES system work. resent most of the CAPEX in projects His customers come to see the tests of ry, but Perry’s already ramped up from The company colors of one module they’re pitching their clients. “We’re an their orders before they ship, and we see zero to 30 cell modules a day in just a we see are Siemens’, but Rolls-Royce is intel-inside business. Intel inside, B2B,” a 700 volt system being tested for high few months. With his easygoing man- understood to also have been by to audit Perry explains. “They get a price and and low peak power. “It’s way cheaper to ner, it’s easy to forget Perry founded the ? rst megawatt-scale marine battery com- pany in the world in Corvus, and that he helped grow it into a serious marine in- dustry player in just four years. He re- members how early in his entrepreneur- ial life, as now, conservative boat owners were resistant to change. “The payback was all about saving fuel money,” he re- calls telling them. Payback in less than ? ve years is a message Norwegian ves- sel owners, operators and propulsion engineers understand immediately from their contact with Perry. For his and his clients’ clients, there’s a powerful sales point — a way for them to earn.

Little Things

He used the same arguments in Aus- tralia, where he used to talk tugboats. “Tugs are fun because they’re a great place to demonstrate just how power- ful a battery is, where a 500-horsepower battery produces 5,000 horse … that is some interesting power.” In Norway, he doesn’t sell directly to the market, just to the end distributors who understand that his “smart” battery systems “talk to each other” and really are “the Internet of things”. They see they can get the voltage they need by ordering the right number of cell modules and that they can get exponential power, safely, because the storage systems remove heat more ef? ciently that chemistry can build it up.

They get that the front plate assembly

Perry’s holding is equipped with a break- er rather than the industry standard fuse because it protects battery and DC buss from damaging each other. “We’re the only company I know of that are actu- ally using breakers on the battery.” Apart from winning over engineers among his clients, his service mind drives a qual- ity focus that’s evident in detail like the touch screen “for managing and observ- ing” cell states in the storage system; the battery module’s simple disconnect rather than pricy power lock to open a module. “We have execution capabilities to match anybody else’s, but we do think a little bit more like mechanics in terms of how to make things friendlier techni- cally.”

Customer Payback

A special orange insulator wrap pro- tects the metal of the cell carrier from any current coming out of the cell itself.

It’s more of the detail system integrators www.marinelink.com 27

MR #4 (26-33).indd 27 MR #4 (26-33).indd 27 4/5/2017 9:09:29 AM4/5/2017 9:09:29 AM