Why are liquid cooled energy storage products more popular
Under the vision of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, the energy storage market has entered a fast lane of development, but the risk of safety accidents has also increased, especially the issue of thermal management of batteries, which has raised concerns. Batteries, like humans, need to work in a comfortable temperature environment. Long term exposure to high temperatures can significantly shorten battery life, degrade performance, and even cause safety accidents. Therefore, precise control of the temperature of the energy storage system is an important part of ensuring the stable operation of the power plant.
Currently, there are solutions for temperature management in the energy storage field, such as air cooling , liquid cooling , solid phase change material cooling, with the previous two technologies being the main focus. We believe that air cooling brings the heat generated by the battery cells to the outside through a fan, which has the advantages of simple structure and low cost. However, the heat transfer coefficient is low, the cooling speed is slow, and a large area of heat dissipation channels is required; Liquid cooled solution is achieved by convective heat transfer of the coolant, which reduces the battery temperature and has a high thermal conductivity, resulting in more uniform cooling . The air cooling solution is based on the first mover advantage in the layout of communication base stations, which currently accounts for a relatively high proportion. However, with the increase of battery energy density and individual capacity, it will generate greater heat generation, posing higher requirements for temperature management of energy storage systems.
In future high-power charging and discharging scenarios or complex working conditions, air cooling technology solutions may not solve the problem of cell heat dissipation, and liquid cooling technology is the development trend of the industry. On the one hand, liquid cooling does not require a reserved cooling channel, which will greatly save the floor area of large-scale energy storage projects; On the other hand, the air-cooled system indirectly cools the battery cells through cooling air, resulting in significant self consumption of the entire energy storage system, while liquid cooled products can reduce this additional operating cost.
At present, the difficulty in promoting liquid cooling solutions in the market lies in their high costs. However, as their technology and application scenarios continue to mature, the comprehensive advantages of liquid cooling in improving energy density, reducing floor space, and reducing energy consumption will be further highlighted.
According to predictions, the global energy storage market will achieve rapid growth in the next decade. Based on the power capacity scale, it will be 20 times that of 2020, and based on the energy capacity scale, it will be 30 times that of 2020. Against the backdrop of the upcoming vigorous development of the energy storage market, with the continuous increase in the electrification of energy storage power stations in the future, liquid cooling solutions will rapidly increase their proportion and become the mainstream of the energy storage market, relying on advantages such as high refrigeration efficiency and low energy consumption.
