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Battery management could be called the Achilles' heel of solar power. Anthony Margida prefers the term "missing link."
With capacity on the rise and prices falling, solar panels are becoming more appealing to consumers and businesses. The problem is, of course, the sun is not always shining. And conventional battery systems used to store sun-generated energy and make it available at night -- or during dreary Northeast Ohio winter days -- are not very efficient.
"If you take that energy and put it in a battery, you lose some of it. And then when you take it out of the battery, you lose some of it also," Margida said. "Ultimately it affects the cost, and when it comes right down to it, there is a business decision to use this type of energy."
Margida hopes the city of Akron -- specifically the city's business incubator, the Akron Global Business Accelerator, which he runs -- will play a key role in making the business case for green energy through the demonstration of locally engineered smart-battery technology.
This spring, 17 solar modules, manufactured by Prism Solar Technology of Highland, N.Y., will be mounted on the roof of the accelerator's offices in Canal Place, the former B.F. Goodrich Tire plant on Main Street. Those modules annually will collect 8,260 kilowatts of solar energy, which will be stored and regulated with a novel battery-management system being commercialized by one of the accelerator's resident companies, Design Flux Technologies. The panels will power LED lights...