NorthStar has won the Sally Miksiewicz Innovation award for its Advanced Connected Energy (ACE) product, which enables customers to assess the state of health of VRLA batteries before they are installed and to monitor them post installation.
The technology, which was featured in an article in the winter issue of BEST magazine (go to page 47), utilises Bluetooth technology and a smartphone app, is the second to be honoured by the award which was established following the tragic death of Sally, the former CEO and Vice chairman of East Penn manufacturing in 2014.
The announcement was made at the Battery Council International ‘s meeting in Jacksonville today (Monday May 1st).
Commenting, NorthStar’s CEO Hans Liden (in picture) said: “Sally believed innovation was a vital part of moving both technology and customer satisfaction forward. The award for ACE innovation is the result of a focused team effort, where our battery design experts have co operated with our creative application engineers to come up with a solution that allows our battery technology to add so much more value than just energy to the customer.”
NorthStar’s prize winning success comes hard on the heels of the company announcing an Energy storage partnership with the City Utilities of Springfield Missouri (where the company has its manufacturing base), to evaluate peak power demand on generation, transmission and distribution. NorthStar’s ACE product will be used for battery monitoring.
“The ESS market is expected to grow to US$200-400 billion by 2040 and represents a significant growth opportunity for NorthStar. In light of this global development, and given this partnership’s importance specifically for Springfield, our joint project with City Utilities is very important”, says Hans Lidén.
NorthStar ACE is a fully integrated remote monitoring system combining Bluetooth communication with an Internet of Things (IoT) concept.
The cloud service is built to aggregate and display data on a system level, but still only require a few clicks to display detailed data for a single battery. The system enables full control of the energy storage from anywhere at any time, which improves operation significantly. The joint ESS project will be deployed in September 2017.
NorthStar was founded in the USA in 2000 and is now owned by a Swedish Private equity firm Altor. Employing 600 people world wide the company turnover was $200 million in 2015.