Inside the Pack Manager: The power electronics behind Redwood's universal battery translator

At Redwood, we're building energy storage solutions powered by EV battery packs, which means we spend a lot of time thinking about the material we're receiving: the packs themselves. More than 100 distinct battery electric vehicle models have been sold in the United States. Each of these packs were engineered to power a specific vehicle, under that vehicle's own battery management system, at its own voltage and current profile. Each one carries a different pack architecture with different chemistry, different voltage, different controls software, different mechanical form factor. And none were designed with the expectation that they would someday power an entirely different application, alongside packs from other manufacturers, at different states of health, with a decades-long service life.

Reconciling those differences in chemistry, voltage, control software, and wear, while still delivering the reliability and warrantied performance grid infrastructure requires, is where Redwood has concentrated some of its hardest engineering work.

The result is the Pack Manager, our proprietary power electronics platform that sits between each individual EV battery pack and the rest of the Redwood battery energy storage system (BESS). This custom Redwood power electronics acts as a universal translator for any EV battery pack. A General Motors pack, a Rivian pack, and a Volkswagen pack can connect to the same system and operate as a single energy asset.