Startups Tuck Small Batteries Into Food Carts, E-Bikes and Stoves to Ease Grid Strain

Installing a large battery in New York City means cutting through a tangled set of regulations, which has made it hard to bring major storage projects onto the grid there, the publication reported on October 1. The smaller units are modest on their own, but the companies behind them say they could add up to substantial capacity.

PopWheels has built a battery-swapping system for delivery drivers who ride e-bikes. Drivers exchange depleted batteries for charged ones at a cabinet instead of stopping to charge. Co-founder David Hammer said at a New York Climate Week event on September 24 that the company has about 50 cabinets across the city and about 2,500 batteries in circulation. It recently began supplying batteries to food cart operators, replacing the gas generators many of them rely on. About four of its batteries provide five kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly enough to cover a day's operation for many carts.

Hammer said at the event that the biggest challenge for large-scale centralized storage providers is that "their benefits are abstract and their costs are concrete."

Copper builds induction stoves with integrated batteries. The appliances allow residents to cook when the power goes out, and they can help homeowners avoid expensive electrical upgrades because the battery supplies part of the power while the stove is in use. "We're not just selling a battery for resilience—we're selling it for cost savings," co-founder and CEO Sam Calisch said at the same event.

Other companies are targeting plug-in storage for homes and businesses. Every Electric's battery is designed to plug into an air-conditioning unit; the company provides the batteries and pays customers to cut their use when the grid is under stress. David Energy runs a similar business model but focuses on businesses such as laundromats, parking garages and gyms.

Because these batteries are small or integrated into another device, they generally require neither grid upgrades nor extensive permitting. Users plug them in and draw the benefits, in a pattern similar to the growing use of balcony solar, where small modules offset a home's or business's energy demand.

"This is the biggest thing to happen in the power grid sector in the last 20 years," said James McGinniss, co-founder and CEO of David Energy. Calisch said that if every stove in America shipped with a battery, the total would amount to tens of gigawatts—capacity that could be aggregated and tapped when the grid is strained.

Large, utility-scale battery installations are coming online quickly around the world, but they have drawn pushback from some communities, especially densely populated ones such as New York City, over concerns about relatively rare but high-profile battery fires.

MIT Technology Review noted that the need for large-scale energy storage is not going away: bigger installations do the essential work of supporting intermittent renewables such as wind and solar so they can meet more of the growing demand for electricity. The grid is becoming more congested, particularly in dense cities, and the publication pointed to the value of anything that could help avoid summer blackouts.