Former senior telecommunication executive John Lindsay, who is a Redflow director, has recorded a YouTube video to highlight the benefits of the Redflow BMS (Battery Management System) for telecommunication companies.
Telcos, including Optus in Australia, Vodafone and RCG in New Zealand and Mobax in South Africa, have deployed Redflow’s zinc-bromine flow batteries to provide energy storage for mobile phone towers in their respective countries.
John Lindsay, who was previously CTO of major telecommunication companies including Internode and iiNet Limited, said he was “quite impressed” by the way Redflow’s BMS solved problems that he used to experience managing batteries for those ISPs.
“In a former life … I was responsible for batteries at remote telecommunication facilities and managing them was quite difficult,” he said.
“Unlike traditional electrochemical batteries, the Redflow Zinc-Bromine Module, or ZBM, has an on-board manager that decides whether each ZBM can be charged, discharged, put to sleep or woken up. Each group of ZBMs can have a Battery Management System, or BMS, which coordinates the operations of the ZBMs and communicates with the battery charger and load with an interface called CANBUS.
“The Redflow BMS connects to a Redflow Cloud service which securely monitors the status of every ZBM and securely allows the on-board software, or firmware, to be updated, just like your computer gets updated, so you ZBM will probably be smarter in the future.
“As a former telco and ISP Chief Technology Officer, the Redflow BMS really excites me because the power systems used for mobile base station and wireless ISP sites are usually very simple – a battery charger – and the equipment is often connected directly to the batteries. Sometimes, the first time you find a lithium or lead-acid battery cell has failed is when the equipment at the site stops working.”
