Battery, Solar & EV Sourcing Glossary
These ten technical, quality-control, customs, and total-cost-of-ownership terms govern equipment specification, pre-shipment factory inspection, dangerous-goods transport compliance, and delivered landed-cost modeling when commercial and industrial buyers source lithium iron phosphate battery energy storage, solar PV modules, power converters, and EV charging equipment from China.
Core sourcing and engineering terms
Cycle Life
The number of complete charge-and-discharge cycles a battery completes under stated depth of discharge, C-rate, and temperature before reaching its end-of-life capacity threshold.
Depth of Discharge (DoD)
The percentage of nominal battery capacity discharged during an operating cycle relative to full capacity, governing usable daily kilowatt-hour throughput and warranty bounds.
UN 38.3
The mandatory eight-test United Nations transport safety standard required before offering lithium cells, modules, or battery packs for international sea, air, road, or rail freight.
Acceptance Quality Limit (AQL)
The statistical lot-sampling threshold under ISO 2859-1 that sets sample sizes and maximum allowable defect counts during pre-shipment factory inspections in China.
Landed Cost
The complete delivered price of imported equipment at the buyer's site gate, combining supplier Incoterm price, freight, insurance, customs brokerage, duties, taxes, and inland haulage.
Peak Shaving
Dispatching on-site battery storage or solar-plus-storage during intervals of highest facility electrical demand to cap utility kilowatt peaks and reduce monthly capacity charges.
C-Rate
The charge or discharge current expressed relative to nominal amp-hour capacity, determining system duration, power-conversion sizing, factory capacity grading, and thermal design.
Hybrid Inverter
A bi-directional multi-port power converter combining solar MPPT DC-to-AC conversion and battery charging/discharging within one unit for self-consumption and backup islanding.
Time-of-Use (TOU) Tariff
A utility electricity rate schedule that divides the day and season into peak, shoulder, and off-peak price tiers, setting the gross spread available for battery arbitrage.
Round-Trip Efficiency (RTE)
The percentage of gross charging electricity recovered as net discharged energy over a complete storage cycle after cell, inverter, transformer, and cooling losses.
How these terms connect to Tradvolt models
Every term in this glossary maps directly to an input row or inspection step across our engineering and procurement documentation. To see how these parameters are applied in practice, review our cost modelling methods, our overarching landed cost and TCO modelling process, our corridor-specific total-cost-of-ownership studies, and our pre-shipment technical inspection and compliance guides.