The Future of Energy Storage: How String PCS & Active Balancing Define Project Values

DALLAS, March 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. energy storage market reached a major milestone in 2024, with CAISO surpassing 13GW of grid-scale storage. Other regions, including ERCOT, are expanding rapidly, while the Midwest and Southeast present new deployment opportunities. According to the American Clean Power Association (ACP), ERCOT's clean power demand is expected to nearly double by 2030 due to population growth, extreme weather, and rising industrial energy needs. Energy storage is crucial to meeting these demands, providing a scalable and reliable solution for grid stability.

Speaking at the 2025 Energy Storage Summit USA, Steven Chan, CLOU North America GM, emphasized battery storage's critical role in managing Texas's anticipated peak demand surge. Held in Dallas on March 26-27, the summit brought together nearly 1,000 industry leaders, including CLOU Overseas GM Songyu He, and CLOU's expert team.

Steven stressed that success in energy storage extends beyond technology—it requires strong financing, operations, and optimization to align with evolving grid needs and investor expectations. He highlighted two key technologies poised to transform the industry: String PCS and Active Balancing.

Traditional storage systems rely on passive balancing, which causes voltage imbalances within battery packs, leading to frequent maintenance and downtime. Engineers typically spend hours manually balancing packs, incurring significant costs—up to $192K to $3.84M over 20 years. CLOU's Active Balancing technology solves this by maintaining cell voltage deviations below 5mV, ensuring better performance while reducing balancing time. Compared to passive methods, it offers: 4% capacity increase, 2.13% longer lifespan, lower maintenance costs and system downtime.

CLOU's TX10 project in Texas was the first in the industry to deploy a full-scale cell-to-rack active balancing system. As a result, all nine sites ranked in ERCOT's Top 30 for market revenue in 2023, generating $196K/MW annually (Modo Energy).

Steven also outlined the advantages of String PCS over Centralized PCS. In a 5MWh system, a centralized PCS failure causes a total system outage. However, with String PCS, only the affected unit (~0.417MWh) is lost—just 1/12th of the total capacity. In a 100MWh project, String PCS improves availability by 4.8%, significantly boosting reliability.

CLOU, as part of Midea Industrial Tech, is expanding globally. Songyu He highlighted CLOU's flexible solutions through software and system integration partnerships. With cutting-edge technology and a forward-looking approach, CLOU is driving the next wave of energy storage innovation.

SOURCE CLOU Electronics Co., Ltd.