Lead –acid batteries can cover a wide range of requirements and may be further optimised for particular applications (Fig. 10). 5. Operational experience Lead–acid batteries have been used for energy storage in utility applications for many years but it hasonlybeen in recentyears that the demand for battery energy storage has increased.
Lead–acid batteries may be flooded or sealed valve-regulated (VRLA) types and the grids may be in the form of flat pasted plates or tubular plates. The various constructions have different technical performance and can be adapted to particular duty cycles. Batteries with tubular plates offer long deep cycle lives.
A selection of larger lead battery energy storage installations are analysed and lessons learned identied. Lead is the most efcientlyrecycled commodity fi fi metal and lead batteries are the only battery energy storage system that is almost completely recycled, with over 99% of lead batteries being collected and recycled in Europe and USA.
Electrochemical energy storage in batteries is attractive because it is compact, easy to deploy, economical and provides virtually instant response both to input from the battery and output from the network to the battery.
Currently, stationary energy-storage only accounts for a tiny fraction of the total sales of lead–acid batteries. Indeed the total installed capacity for stationary applications of lead–acid in 2010 (35 MW) was dwarfed by the installed capacity of sodium–sulfur batteries (315 MW), see Figure 13.13.
Lead batteries cover a range of different types of battery which may be ooded and require maintenance watering or valve-regulated fl batteries and only require inspection.