On a distribution feeder, the battery is rarely the expensive part of a storage project. The expensive parts are the concrete, the wayleave, the fence and the twelve months spent agreeing them — for a problem that is often measured in tens of kilowatts.
That ratio is what the pole-mount line exists to change.
What the constraint actually is
Put a cabinet on the ground and you inherit a chain of obligations before any engineering starts. Somebody owns the field. Somebody has to agree a lease. Somebody has to pour a base that will take the weight, fence it against livestock and vandalism, and maintain the access track that gets a van to it.
None of that scales down. A 100 kWh installation carries almost exactly the same land and civils overhead as one five times its size, which is why small grid-edge interventions so often do not happen at all.
Meanwhile, at nearly every site where the problem exists, there is already a pole. It is already the network operator's asset. It already has a route to it, and it already has the connection you want to work with at the top of it.
What we built
Two cabinets on one concrete pole: a battery cabinet and a PCS/control cabinet, bolted or strapped to a pole that is already standing.
| Figure | Value | | --- | --- | | Rated active power | 40 kW, 40 kVA continuous at 50 °C ambient | | Usable energy | 96 kWh at beginning of life | | AC connection | 400 V, three phase, four wire, 50 Hz | | Round-trip efficiency | 89.8 %, AC to AC | | Cells | Prismatic LiFePO4, EVE MB31, 51.2 V nominal | | Cycle life | 4,000 at 90 % DoD, 15-year design life | | Enclosure | IP55, hot-dip galvanised and painted | | Weight | 1,150 kg — 950 kg battery, 200 kg PCS | | Communications | Modbus, DNP3 · Ethernet, cellular modem |
Three things in there are worth explaining.
Four-quadrant control. The PCS sets real and reactive power independently, anywhere from 0.8 lagging to 0.8 leading. That is what lets one unit shave a peak, hold a voltage up with Volt-VAr droop, or absorb solar that would otherwise push reverse power flow back up the feeder — scheduled daily or weekly, or dispatched remotely over Modbus.
Air-conditioning in the cabinet. The cells are rated to operate from 0 to 45 °C; the PCS is rated for its full 40 kVA at 50 °C ambient. Integrated cabinet air-conditioning sits between those two numbers, so no external HVAC has to be installed or maintained beside the pole.
A paint system for the coast. The enclosures are hot-dip galvanised to BS 729 and painted to BS 5493 for an exposed, polluted coastal atmosphere, with a 10 – 20 year maintenance period. A pole-mounted asset spends its whole life outdoors with no building around it, and the cost difference between specifying for that and specifying for a plant room is small at the point of manufacture and enormous seven years later.
What it does not do
It does not island as supplied. Grid-forming, islanded operation is an option rather than part of the base unit, so out of the box it supports the feeder it is connected to rather than carrying loads through an outage.
It also assumes the pole can take it. A survey measures condition, existing loading and access before anything is ordered, and a pole that cannot carry 1,150 kg plus wind load is a pole we will recommend you do not use. That conversation is cheaper before manufacture than after.
Where it is
The specification is published. The pole-mount product page carries every figure above and the full datasheet as a PDF — and if you operate feeders and have a site in mind, it is also the place to start that conversation.