Webinar Announcement: Making a 10-year lifetime Solar eCooking Battery for Rural Africa

Date: 18th November 2024

Categories: Webinar

Registration is now open to join our upcoming webinar “Making a 10-year lifetime Solar eCooking Battery for Rural Africa”. This event is organised by MECS programme and will be held on Wednesday 27th of November 2024, at 16:00-17:00 (GMT).

Moderator:

Dr Simon Batchelor, (OBE), Gamos Ltd., Loughborough University.

Presenters:

Robert Van Buskirk: Chief Executive Volunteer at Solar4Africa. Solar4Africa is a social enterprise whose mission is to accelerate poverty reduction and health improvement for rural Africans through the distribution of household solar electric systems and batteries.

Skyler Selvin: PhD Candidate at Stanford University and volunteer Engineer at Solar4Africa. Skyler is designer of the lithium-titanate (LTO) battery being built by Kachione LLC in Malawi.

Webinar Background:

With Off Grid Solar Electric Cooking (OGSEC) it is now possible to provide daytime eCooking to rural Africans as a cost of less than $0.20/kWh for a battery-free eCooking system. But the addition of a battery provides three key benefits: (1) Electricity for nighttime use, (2) Greater flexibility regarding when people can cook, and (3) Greater utilization of system capacity.

But a key problem with designing a battery for off-grid eCooking, is that a user might cook 3 to 5 dishes per day, which for a low-capacity battery can result in cycling the battery more than 10,000 times over 10 years.

In this webinar, Skyler and Robert outline how this technical and economic challenge can be solved with a custom-designed LTO battery. They will compare the economics and performance of different battery chemistry options and outline the process of designing a custom eCooking battery. They will describe the design of their high-performance, low-cost, long-lasting battery and the assembly process for producing the batteries from pouch cells purchased from manufacturers. The features and performance ratings of the battery and the Battery Management System (BMS) will be described. And they will conclude by describing their ambitions for rolling out LTO batteries for eCooking in Africa at larger scale over the coming years.

***************************************************************************************************************