Tesla’s Powerwall has a new competitor – Australian energy company Lavo’s “hydrogen battery” called the Green Energy Storage System. It’s a new kind of home energy storage system that isn’t a battery but serves the same purpose as one. Lavo is an electrolysis system, fuel cell power system, and hydrogen storage array all tucked into a cabinet.
Lavo also absorbs excess wind or solar energy like the Powerwall, but it stores the energy as hydrogen fuel instead of other chemicals like in a lithium battery. Its electrolysis unit uses excess renewable power to generate hydrogen from water, then holds it in the red hydride containers you see on the box’s left side.
When electricity is needed (like at night when there’s no sun, or if there’s no wind, or if there’s a grid power outage), the fuel cell converts the hydrogen into electricity – like a hydrogen vehicle. It even contains a 5-kWh lithium buffer battery for instantaneous response.
Lavo boasts almost three times more capacity than Tesla’s current-gen Powerwall 2. The massive 324 kg (714 lb) system stores 40 kilowatt-hours worth of energy – enough to power a home for two days straight. Thanks to its Wi-Fi connectivity, you can monitor and control everything through a phone app.
Businesses with higher power needs can use the Lavo system too by running several in parallel to form an “intelligent virtual power plant.”
The Green Energy Storage System lasts twice as long as a lithium battery system (30 years vs. 15) and is more eco-friendly since it doesn’t use all those rare earth metals and toxic chemicals. The unit may be large, but the company says it’s more compact than the equivalent amount of battery storage.
But it does lack efficiency. The process of generating hydrogen is only about 80% efficient, and then you lose half of what you stored in the process of converting the hydrogen back into energy. Lavo says its round-trip efficiency is just above 50%. With batteries, you get back over 90% of what you stored. So, the 40-kWh hydrogen energy storage system is more of a 20-kWh system when you get the energy back out of it.
Nevertheless, it’s more sustainable ingredients-wise. And hydrogen is a popular topic in the clean energy sector nowadays, so the unit should only evolve for the better from here.
According to Henry Sun, CEO Providence Asset Group:
The timing is right for hydrogen as the cost of renewables has fallen quicker than predicted, and there is unprecedented political support for this emerging industry.
The system costs more than what you’d pay for three Powerwalls in Australia – AU$34,750 (about US$26,900) – but the price is set to drop by the end of 2022 to AU$29,450 (about US$22,800) when the unit becomes available internationally.
