20 to 30 percent of the costs involved in planning, permitting and engineering the installation of equivalent storage capacity from a centrally located battery.

“It’s very cumbersome in a small or medium-size building to figure out where storage goes,” Yotta CEO Omeed Badkoobeh said in an interview last week. ​“Just getting a competent proposal put together for a building is a very arduous and costly proposition.”

“We’re removed all those barriers. We’ve made storage an intrinsic part of the solar,” he said.

Now, with a recent $5 million seed round, a contract manufacturing deal with Flex, and a newly introduced system that integrates solar panels, racking equipment and microinverters in one package, the Austin, Texas–based startup is looking for solar installers to bring it to market. That, he said, will give Yotta Energy a chance to scale production of its 1 kilowatt-hour SolarLeaf batteries to bring them into price-competitive range with larger-scale lithium-ion contenders.

“We wanted to simplify storage,” said Badkoobeh, who got his start installing solar at the turn of the last decade. Since then, he’s seen microinverter and module-level power electronics from companies like Enphase and SolarEdge move from being untested, panel-mounted replacements for central string inverters to capturing much of the rooftop solar market.

“Module-level power electronics have gone this way,” he told Canary Media. ​“Why can’t you do it with a battery?”

Yotta Energy isn’t the only company to hit upon this idea. California-based JLM Energy promised a similar module-linked battery, but closed its doors in 2018. SolPad, another California-based startup, unstealthed in 2016 promising a panel-mounted battery for both residential and commercial application, although its marketing is largely aimed at residential customers.

“Everyone’s thought about panel-level storage,” Badkoobeh said. ​“But the technology behind it, and making it reliable and robust, and taking it to market — that’s the tough part.”

Keeping batteries cool on hot rooftops

Badkoobeh highlighted several factors he believes differentiate Yotta from competitors, starting with safety features. Since its 2016 founding, the startup has developed a novel thermal management system that uses no moving parts, based on a ceramic container and phase-change heat exchange technology developed for NASA spacecraft.

“We have tailored a phase-change material that for all intents and purposes is a high-grade wax, that has a melting point of 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Andrew Tanner, Yotta’s vice president of strategy and growth. Heat that isn’t absorbed by the ceramic envelope is absorbed in the melting of the wax, which solidifies as temperatures drop again.

That can prevent its batteries from overheating to dangerous levels on rooftops exposed to hot summer sun, even when outside temperatures approach 140 degrees Fahrenheit, according to testing with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The batteries Yotta uses from partner Murata are also lithium iron phosphate (LFP), a chemistry far less prone to thermal runaway than the lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt-oxide (NMC) chemistry favored by the electric vehicle industry and some stationary storage applications. More and more battery vendors are making the switch from NMC to LFP for this reason.

One big question for Yotta’s approach is how fire departments and building departments across the country will view the potential risk of having batteries on rooftops. ​“We’re going through that right now,” Tanner said. ​“Everything’s been very favorable.” But the novelty of what Yotta is planning hasn’t yet been incorporated into building and fire codes, which makes for some uncertainty.

An integrated solution to cut balance-of-systems costs

As for convincing commercial solar developers and installers that its technology is ready for prime time, Badkoobeh pointed to Yotta’s integration with well-known systems partners, including battery manufacturer Murata, solar PV module maker Hanwha Q Cells, solar racking supplier Panelclaw and microinverter maker AP Systems.

On Tuesday, Yotta announced its latest technology integration with AP Systems: a dual power inverter that can work interchangeably with solar and energy storage. Not only does this streamline the integrated solar-storage proposition, Badkoobeh said, but it also meets ​“rapid shutdown” regulations under the National Electrical Code that are being adopted in many states for new rooftop solar systems.

Click here to read this article with Canary Media.