Degradation
Degradation in the SpeicherCampus context: depends on cycles, temperature, SOC and operating strategy. Technically, the term is usually described as battery ageing.
What does degradation mean?
Degradation is the battery’s gradual ageing: with every cycle and every calendar year, available capacity declines. It has two components — cyclic ageing (driven by cycle count, C-rate and depth of discharge) and calendar ageing (driven by temperature and storage SOC).
Degradation is not a defect but physics — plannable physics: good operating strategy slows it markedly, and the design must account for it from day one.
What matters in practice
- design for capacity at end of warranty, not the as-new value
- temperature is the biggest lever: cool, even operation preserves the cells
- a permanently high SOC accelerates calendar ageing — adjust the EMS strategy
- SOH monitoring makes the trend visible and warranty claims provable
Practical example
Two identical systems, two sites: one stands cool and ventilated, cycling between 20 and 80 % SOC; the other hot and always full. After eight years, 7 percentage points of SOH separate them — operating strategy made the difference, not the product.
The SpeicherCampus perspective
SpeicherCampus includes degradation in every economic assessment and chooses EMS strategies that do not sacrifice lifetime for the last percent of yield.