The abbreviation SoC — stands for State of Charge, i.e. the state of charge of batteries. This is usually given as a percentage, where 100% stands for fully charged and 0% for empty. Determining the state of charge of batteries is particularly challenging because chemical reactions for current conversion are constantly taking place inside the battery. Depending on the environmental conditions, these reactions sometimes have a higher, sometimes a lower efficiency. There is no single state of charge for batteries. The amount of current that can be charged into and withdrawn from a battery always depends on the environmental conditions under which this happens.

However, the standard SoC value of many battery systems does not take this into account. It merely indicates how high the SoC of a normal, new battery would be under defined laboratory conditions. In practice, therefore, the SoC displayed is often up to 20% off the actual state of charge of a battery. This leads, for example, to cell phones surprisingly going off even though sufficient charge is still displayed. To compensate for this effect, manufacturers of larger battery systems work with state-of-charge reserves that are not displayed to the user. These reserves can be used with artificial intelligence from NOVUM, because if you know the exact state of charge of your batteries, you no longer need uncertainty reserves.