Soon, Solar Trees will take root in Pennsylvania and will feed electricity into PowerCubes to provide power to electric vehicles and the grid. That’s how new battery technologies will work together.

Envision Solar International’s photovoltaic (PV) sun-tracking carports may provide a solution that can power electric cars with renewable energy and provide power storage for use onsite.

The project showcases how Axion Power International’s PowerCube, which uses its next generation batteries, will serve as an intermediary PV storage device that can also supply conditioned power to the grid. The ability for devices to provide power storage is becoming more important as more people adopt solar and wind across the country.

Axion won a $300,000 grant from Pennsylvania’s Solar Energy Program to support this study into how its large-scale battery back will work over the long-term when it is hooked up to the PV apparatus, the vehicle charger, the facility, and the grid.

The PowerCube is an Axion battery bank installed in a small, truck-sized shipping container that is capable of delivering up to 1 megawatt of battery storage that can handle energy generated by sources like wind and solar. Axion’s batteries are designed to handle short-term charge-up and deep discharges over a long period of time, like the lead-acid marine batteries used by most PV and wind systems with battery backups. However, the batteries use carbon-based supercapacitors to reduce corrosion damage and create lead-acid batteries with longer lifespans.

“The installation is composed of two tracking solar trees. Each one has a 15 kilowatt output,” explained Envision President Desmond Wheatley. The tracking feature of the trees will allow them to boost efficiency by 18 to 25 percent, he said.

“We will also integrate Axion’s PowerCube battery storage solution so that the trees can operate off-grid,” he said. “Solar [power] will charge the Power Cube which will energize the EV [i.e., electric vehicle] charging station.”

According to Wheatley, the trees will also be grid-tied.

Envision will install its Solar Trees over Axion’s parking lot to power electric vehicles that use Axion’s next generation lead-acid-carbon battery technology. While this is far from the first photovoltaic (PV) carport application, it does represent one of the early forays into creating a PV carport that can charge an electric vehicle and provide extra electricity for onsite usage.

The solar arrays will use Envision’s EnvisionTrack and CleanCharge technologies to allow cars to charge at the site and also to charge Axion PowerCubes.