The smelter draws hard in the late afternoon, then drops to a base load overnight. Shandong’s peak-valley price spread is wide enough that running a battery through one full peak cycle per day pays back the cabinet inside the warranty window. We have shipped two of them to the same site.
The first went in during a planned shutdown, so the install could ride the existing main transformer through the cut-over. The second was a clean retrofit: same cabinet rating, different cell supplier, different local integrator. We have learned the hard way that battery-vendor lock-in is rarely the PCS supplier’s decision. The cabinet should not care which cell is bolted to the other side.
Cabinet specification
- 500 kW bidirectional PCS, 600–1500 V DC battery side
- 400 V AC three-phase output, 50 Hz, transformer step-up to 10 kV on site
- LiFePO4 battery, 1 MWh rated, containerised
- Full cabinet pre-assembled in Jinan and tested under load before dispatch
Operating notes from year one
The site runs the cabinet on two cycles: a hard peak cut from 14:00 to 21:00, and a soft standby hold overnight to keep the cell temperature inside the BMS window. The cabinet logs cycle count and round-trip efficiency on every dispatch. After 12 months the operators handed us the report without us asking for it — round-trip efficiency was 96.4% at the cabinet AC terminals, which is the number we measure in the factory, not the marketing number that everyone tends to put on a brochure.
The second cabinet was ordered with a small change: the BMS protocol stack added one extra vendor (the cell supplier changed). The cabinet itself was identical. That was the whole reason we standardised on a single Modbus / CAN gateway in the first place — so swapping cells is a software update, not a hardware change.
Where this fits
If you are sizing a cabinet for industrial peak shaving, the two numbers that matter are the peak price spread on your local tariff and the round-trip efficiency of the cabinet you are buying. Everything else is secondary. Get those two right and the payback arithmetic looks the same in Zibo and in Johannesburg.
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