Barcelona-Based Mobility Company Silence is Building an Ecosystem around Modular Batteries

We first ran into Barcelona-based electric mobility company Silence at EICMA in Milan, Italy, where they announced three new two-wheeled electric mobility vehicles.

The critical technology underpinning Silence’s vehicles is a modular battery system built by Silence’s parent company Acciona. Their primary product for mobility applications is a 5.5 kilowatt-hour modular, portable battery that slots directly into their electric vehicles. For smaller, more efficient electric vehicles, 5.5 kWh translates into a meaningful amount of range per day, enabling vehicles to swap batteries instead of relying on a fixed charging network.

By itself, battery swapping is not novel, as many companies have modular, removable batteries. Acciona’s units have a luggage handle and folding wheels that allow you to stand it up much like you would a piece of luggage, popping the wheels out the bottom and pulling the handle out the top. This converts the otherwise unmanageable mass of lithium, etc. into a roll-along suitcase rather than a hefty battery that must be carried around.

For apartment dwellers, modular batteries are critical, as they allow you to leave the vehicle downstairs on the street. Instead of worrying about the entire vehicle, the battery can be wheeled up to your apartment or into your house to charge overnight.

Vehicles

The primary use case for these batteries is to power an electric vehicle. To date, Silence has introduced a wide range of compact electric vehicles designed for urban markets. They make a few different electric scooters, a little electric motorcycle called the S05 WKND_R, and even a microcar they call the S04.

At EICMA, Silence introduced a new dual-battery GP-style scooter boasting even more range and flexible battery options. The company’s range of vehicles includes the S01, S01+, S02 Delivery, S02 Road, the S04 micro car, as well as the yet-to-be-named dual-battery GP.

After a day of riding around, the battery can be seamlessly disconnected from the vehicle and wheeled into the house where it plugs into a charging dock. Thanks to its wheels and handle, the battery never needs to be lifted by the driver, which makes it a much more viable option for riders of all shapes and sizes.

Bi-directional battery charging

The charging dock where the battery lives while it’s being juiced up overnight is a key piece of Silence’s business model. Acciona was thinking ahead when it developed the modular battery system with an inverter that converts the home’s AC power to DC for the battery. The idea is that while you’re charging, the dock pulls power through the inverter into the battery. That’s going to be your day in and day out use case.

If disaster strikes and your home loses power at night, the inverter is able to flip power around and pull power from the batteries in the dock to power the house. The 30 kW inverter can connect up to six of Acciona’s 5.5 kWh batteries to the house at one time.

What’s great about having the batteries in the dock to charge accomplishes two things. It charges the batteries and connects them to the home’s electrical grid, where they can be used as a battery backup for the home.

The modular nature of Acciona’s batteries and their intelligent integration into the home power system allows homeowners to literally bring their energy storage along with them wherever they go. This ensures that they have all the range they need in their vehicle as well as extra power to back up their home if they need it at night.

This type of integration of batteries and electric vehicles into the home is something we don’t see often, but it feels like a step into the future…. A future where each home produces, stores, and uses its own energy…. A future where each home in a neighborhood can step up to support each other for a more resilient, sustainable electrical grid.

Head over to the company’s website for more information about Silence, its modular Acciona battery system, its vehicles, and its home energy storage system.