The HVAC Battery Club gets a little bigger

The oldest HVAC company still in business, Carrier, is getting into batteries. 

“Our next-generation … architectures will not only … provide comfort … to the homeowner, but they will also provide resiliency to the grid … We're basically integrating onboard energy storage — lithium-ion batteries — in the heart of our HVAC units,” said Hakan Yilmaz, SVP, CTO, and CSO at Carrier, a few weeks ago, at New York Climate Week. 

First of all, Hakan, we’d like to congratulate you on the alphabet soup of amazing titles you’ve managed to collect during your career at Carrier.  Well played. Second, we’d like to give you a giant hug for your efforts to avoid exacerbating the duck curve. 

As we transition from gas to electricity (via heat pumps) as a way to heat our homes, we run the risk of destabilizing the electric grid: when it’s cold outside, everyone wants heat. If we’re all pulling energy off the grid in real time, it really stresses out the infrastructure, which leads to things like higher costs, brownouts, and blackouts.  No bueno.

Batteries can help smooth that demand curve by pulling energy off the grid when it’s cheaper and cleaner - in the middle of the day, when there’s a lot of solar on the grid - and storing it for later, when we need it.

But, may we take a moment here to re-introduce ourselves a little? Harvest does the same thing, for heating - with a battery that doesn’t use conflict minerals. Our battery also doesn’t wear out. And it’s cheaper to build.

Harvest is now, as Carrier’s next-gen HVAC will be, a load-shifting system. We store cheap, clean energy in a battery, too - but our battery is made of water.

You’ve heard us say that our thermal battery is smart. But one thing we don’t talk about enough is that it’s also simple. Water is just a better storage medium for heat energy than a lithium-ion battery.

We need an all-of-the-above strategy to kill the climate crisis, and we welcome Carrier into the HVAC-battery arena. Let’s hang out, but when we see each other, please remind us to not spill our water battery on your lithium battery.