The News: The newest battery energy storage system (BESS) from Honeywell for commercial and industrial customers is a modular, high energy density portable system that is small enough to be installed using a standard forklift, allowing customers to easily introduce specialized power plant capabilities wherever they are needed. The new Honeywell Ionic BESS was announced June 19 at the Honeywell User Group (HUG) Performance Materials and Technologies “Optimizing Transformation” conference in Orlando. Read the Press Release about the new Honeywell Ionic BESS on the company’s Performance Materials and Technologies website.

Latest Battery Energy Storage System Unveiled by Honeywell

Analyst Take: This latest battery energy storage system from Honeywell, the Ionic BESS, will give commercial and industrial customers more capabilities and options when they are seeking energy storage systems for a variety of uses. Equipped with lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cells, the Ionic is designed to provide more energy density than products from competitors, while allowing customers to scale the system based on their needed energy requirements from 700 kilowatt hours (kWh) to about 300 megawatt hours (MWh) of capacity.

For customers, I believe that this broad flexibility from the Ionic BESS is valuable, giving them the ability to custom configure an energy storage system to meet the needs of any project, while also giving them the ability to expand it later if that is required. The ability to expand such a system rather than having to remove it and replace it with a larger one is a huge cost benefit over starting from scratch and buying a bigger system to replace a smaller one that reaches its capacity. It also means that customers do not have to purchase more energy storage capacity than they need at initial installation and can defer additional costs until such capacity is required later. That is smart planning for users, who I believe will appreciate the flexibility as well as the nod to economizing.

Latest Battery Energy Storage System Features

The Honeywell Ionic BESS is managed using the included Honeywell’s Experion Energy Control System and a chemistry-agnostic Honeywell battery management system (BMS), which combine to provide customers with flexible controls to manage their Ionic energy storage systems wherever they are used. The Honeywell Experion Energy Control System provides the tools to manage and optimize energy use for users by improving uptime and enabling the shaving of energy use spikes or peaks, while also allowing the creation of flexible virtual power plants (VPPs). The BMS delivers insights into the performance of the Ionic units at the cell level and can be configured later to work with new battery types and chemistries as they are improved in the future.

Also included in the new Honeywell Ionic BESS is a liquid cooling system which equalizes battery temperatures throughout charging and discharging cycles to prolong battery life and improve performance. The Ionic BESS uses a 1500 volt DC battery stack to maximize power conversion efficiency and it provides DC power augmentation support if needed by customers.

The main features of Honeywell Ionic are designed to help customers optimize their energy costs while also storing backup power and reducing their carbon footprint, according to Honeywell. Also making Ionic more attractive is that it is small enough to be installed using a forklift and simple site preparation, rather than requiring massive construction or assembly schedules or costs.

For many commercial and industrial customers, the Ionic modular BESS will be a good choice for a wide range of business projects.

I especially like that Honeywell Ionic BESS is built to allow the use of multiple battery chemistries, giving it the added flexibility of using various battery brands and types as new battery technologies are developed. This futureproofing will certainly be appreciated by customers. At the same time, the Ionic BESS includes three layers of battery safety protection that are designed to maintain battery health and system safety. Customers can also outfit the systems with Honeywell Li-ion Tamer, which adds another layer of safety for Li-ion batteries by sensing battery problems, including thermal runaway, before they happen.

Latest Battery Energy Storage System Overview

The Honeywell Ionic BESS offering is an attractive offering in the marketplace that delivers value, excellent design, a good feature mix, and a broad range of capabilities to industrial and commercial customers that can benefit from such systems. I believe that the Ionic BESS is well positioned to satisfy a wide range of customer needs in the energy storage system (ESS) marketplace today, while helping users look toward future needs as well. That is a great combination for users.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.