South Africa desperately needs more green battery power storage solutions, but South African companies won’t simply make the switch for environmental reasons – product performance and operational efficiency come first. Sustainability isn’t a luxury — it must support uptime, productivity and cost control.
ROI Comes First
In developing green battery storage products for the South African market, we’ve had to put ROI first – and, as a result, are producing products that operate in environments that US or European markets would describe as ‘worst-case scenario’. These products have to be robust and rugged to serve the South African market, where expectations for performance and up-time are high – and costs, low.
An 8-10-year ROI timeline in the green space is considered really good – but if you’re able to deliver in 5 years or less, you’re doing brilliantly. And we’ve proven that we can, because if a battery storage system survives in South African conditions, it can survive anywhere.
Build Local
While there’s plenty of R&D ‘secret sauce’ to our lithium ion (li-ion) battery storage products, the key element is locality. By having the bulk of our engineering and manufacturing based in South Africa, using the country’s extremely skilled engineers, we can produce most of the elements we need at lower costs than we would be able to in the US or Europe – and give a massive vote of confidence to South African expertise, skill and ability at the same time.
To really build a proper, sustainable, green solution in SA, it’s key that you build the economy and value chain around you – the more you can localise, the better. This means designing locally for local conditions, establishing local manufacturing facilities run by local teams and outsourcing production of components to local industry. You also need to train up local installation teams and establish a local after-sales support network. This creates local jobs and supports local businesses throughout the value chain, creating a local ecosystem that is both good business practice and strengthens our business and our offering.
A local base also means that local expertise is close at hand in the support space. Buying batteries from say, China, may be 10-20% cheaper – but the cost is offset by having to fly out service teams in the event of an issue, ship the product back to its country of origin for inspection and service, or having to find a way to solve an operating challenge yourself as a customer, which is both unconscionable and inefficient. The green transition only works when it enhances the ecosystem around it, and a focus on South African manufacturing and assembly can help move the process forward. We’re not yet able to cost-effectively manufacture battery cells here, so those are imported – but everything else can and should be done in SA.
Batteries Building Better Businesses
Our (maxwell+spark) products are mostly used in refrigerated trucks and forklifts. One of our first customers in Durban bought our li-ion batteries in 2018 to replace lead-acid batteries in their forklifts. We’ve recently moved the same batteries into their new fleet of forklifts and found, under deep testing, that the batteries are delivering the same capacity as they were on the day they were first installed – but also helping save 20-30-% in electricity consumption from the grid, with a similar reduction in CO2 emissions, when compared to lead-acid batteries.
Transport Refrigeration Units (TRU) on trucks have traditionally been powered by diesel – independent of the diesel engines used to power the trucks – and around 15% of all semi-rigid or rigid trucks currently operating in South Africa are fitted with TRUs. The diesel engines used to power the TRUs emit 5-10 times more particulate emissions than the truck engines themselves and close to a third of the CO2 emissions. That means that even when a truck is stopped for a break or parked for loading or offloading – even with its engine off – the diesel-powered TRU is still emitting these high levels of particulate matter, CO2 and generating noise.
Switching TRU power to battery-electric entirely not only cuts out those CO2 and particulate emissions and reduces noise pollution, which anyone living close to a retail store will tell you is a major problem, but also improves the performance and efficiency of the refrigeration system. Industrial logistics is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, but offers the highest returns when you get it right and presents an opportunity for SA to leapfrog global standards.
Not All Lithium-Ion Batteries Are Created Equal
Many customers have initial concerns around the safety of li-ion batteries because they’ve seen videos of li-ion-powered mobile phones and power banks catching fire, or li-ion batteries ‘exploding’ when the vehicles they power are involved in an accident. This does happen – but it’s important to understand why. Most li-ion batteries contain nickel, manganese or cobalt, which are volatile and flammable under stressed conditions.
By using Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry in batteries, it is possible to remove that risk altogether. An additional benefit of the chemistry is that these batteries deliver a longer lifespan and better cycle life (the number of charge/discharge cycles a battery can deliver before its performance starts to decline).
LFP batteries are also better-suited to second and third-life applications. Say a client starts to notice reduced battery performance in a forklift after 8-10 years. That battery will still be operating at 75-85% of its original capacity, so it can be moved to another forklift that operates under lower load or less runtime and still power it more than efficiently. After several years, when the battery is no longer capable of performing well enough in that application, it can be redeployed for static battery storage – like storage from a solar PV system – where it will still be able to deliver useful service because load demand is lower and there a less physical size constraints.
Going Global
When maxwell+spark received backing from global companies like Chevron, it was a massive vote of confidence in South African technology, solutions and manufacturing. While our company is now headquartered in Europe (Rotterdam), most of the R&D, manufacturing and assembly is done in SA. By continuing to forge ahead with taking SA-designed and manufactured products to the world, we’re putting the country on the map as a producer of efficient, cost-effective and powerful green battery storage solutions and receiving a warm response because of the way we’ve built a supportive local ecosystem, in contrast to many battery suppliers from elsewhere in the world which have developed a reputation for disappearing after delivery.
SA can become a leader in sustainable logistics for the region – and in the production of quality battery products with incredible after-sales support.
