A battery node for power plant monitoring systems

Valve regulated lead acid batteries have become the dominant battery for outside plant power system applications. As the usage mushroomed due to tremendous advantages over flooded cells, complaints about short life, unexpected failures, unplanned service calls and general capacity loss have surfaced. This paper presents a “battery node” proposal which strategically monitors and controls up to four strings of batteries. The battery node is targeted to be “online” with full time data acquisition, status calculations and reserve time and life prediction, yet maintain a minimal cost impact by design to the user