Stationary Energy Storage System (ESS) Testing Program

A Cummins / UC San Diego Partnership

Cummins Inc. is expanding their product offering into electrified mobility and energy storage sectors. With a ramping up and production of full electric trucks and stationary energy storage systems, Cummins is seeking viable business and technical approaches to effectively reuse and repurpose electric vehicle batteries.

UC San Diego’s battery validation lab provides testing capability of up to 10 battery systems (100V/100A per system) with full amenities for ventilation, hydrogen/smoke detection, fire suppression, and chemical safety protection. Integrated with the unique UC San Diego microgrid, the lab can offer testing representing various behind-the-meter energy storage services, distributed energy resource (DER) use cases, and wholesale market participation applications.

Specifically, UC San Diego has developed five energy storage application duty cycles:

1) energy time shifting,
2) demand charge management,
3) congestion relief,
4) flexible ramping, and
5) frequency regulation, using data from the California ISO and local utility rates.

These testing duty cycles help to determine battery performance under realistic applications instead of general charge/discharge cycles.This test procedure also provides insight regarding the energy storage system’s economic benefits. Additionally, UC San Diego is actively developing innovative solutions for second-life batteries to continually improve system safety, reliability, and overall value.

UC San Diego prepared an outdoor demonstration setup for second-life system integration of one demonstration system comprised of 8 Cummins second life battery modules. Combining the degraded battery modules UC San Diego integrated a second-life ESSs using pre-determined grid energy storage applications.

Research Team

• Principal Investigator - Dr. Antoni Tong
• Mike Ferry, Energy Storage Program Director
• Melvin Lugo Alvarez, Graduate Researcher
• Lloyd Cibulka, Research Engineer
• Brandon Zhao, Graduate Researcher