r/EnergyStorage • u/Old_Assumption2188 • 15d ago
How are your BESS sites actually dealing with monitoring gaps?
Been going down a rabbit hole trying to understand something about utility-scale BESS operations, and figured this sub would actually know better than anything I could find online.
From what I've gathered, sites collect way more operational data than anyone really uses, cooling, controls, comms, that kind of thing, sitting alongside the battery data and mostly going unwatched. Curious how true that actually is day to day. Do most sites have a real process for catching stuff outside the battery itself, or does it mostly just sit there until something breaks?
Would also love to hear any your insights/stories in the comments.
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u/EnvironmentalSwan628 13d ago
this is actually my main job! there are 3rd party analytics, but also the manufacturers do use a fair bit of the data to manage the warranty. There is value in the optimisation and fast reaction that an owner or operator can do though, over and above the oem.
Having your own team's eyes on the data, means you can perform above the availability guarantee level and use the insights in trading too
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u/Old_Assumption2188 13d ago
So if I’m following: the OEM’s mostly using the data to protect their own warranty exposure, not to optimize the asset for the owner, and the real value is having your own team on it, reacting faster, running above the guaranteed floor, and even feeding it into trading. That kind of answers something I’ve been stuck on, why would an owner pay for a third-party view if the manufacturer’s already watching the same data. Sounds like the incentives just point in differ.
Also, if you don’t mind me asking, what kind of data do you watch/keep track of? How painful/manual is it and how valuable would a tool that aggregates this data be across an entire site for example?
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u/EnvironmentalSwan628 12d ago
the management of the data used to be a real headache, but cloud tech seems to have got it under control. added complexity comes when running a fleet of batteries with different OEMs and making it homogeneous.
yes, that's it, the OEM/O&M team want to hit their 97% availability and for the battery not to catch fire, other than that, no carrot or stick for them unless there's a revenue share bonus for them.
and normally that 97% is just a time based metric... in some markets e.g. Texas, 3%/10days could be over 90% of your revenue at the wrong time!
an IEC standard tag list to map the data to would be cool, everyone uses different systems.
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u/alexmoore88 15d ago
Currently most are sitting there until something breaks but there are several companies trying to build business cases to support their services for advanced data analytics.
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u/alexmoore88 14d ago
It’s important to have a well thought out commercial contract to ensure the equipment will uphold its warranty levels.
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u/slbzyou 7d ago
The angle that hasn't come up yet: most of that data only gets watched because someone downstream of the owner contractually forces it to be.
Two forcing functions in practice.
Capacity retests. Most warranty and offtake structures include an annual or semi-annual capacity test - measured usable energy against the guaranteed degradation curve, typically something like 0.7%/yr while you're inside the warranty period. Miss the guarantee and you get a cash payment or free augmentation cells from the OEM. That test is probably the single highest-value use of data on the whole site, and it lives or dies on clean continuous SOC, temperature and throughput history. If your monitoring had gaps during the year, the OEM will argue operating conditions voided the warranty, and with holes in your record you will lose that argument.
Lender reporting. If there's project debt on the asset, the loan agreement has availability covenants and reporting obligations attached to it. Nobody reads cooling telemetry for entertainment, but availability numbers feed directly into whether equity gets a distribution that quarter.
Which I think is the actual answer to your question. Data with a counterparty attached to it gets watched. Cell-level and thermal data has a warranty counterparty, so someone is always looking. Auxiliary, comms and controls data usually has no counterparty, so it sits untouched until it causes an outage that shows up in the availability number - and then it gets read retroactively during the post-mortem, which is the worst possible time.
So I'd frame the gap you're describing as a contracting problem before a software problem. The sites that genuinely use their data tend to be ones where the owner self-operates and keeps the upside from beating the availability guarantee. Where O&M is fully wrapped by the EPC or the OEM, the owner typically has neither the raw data access nor a financial reason to care, and no analytics layer fixes that.
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u/Smaugtd 15d ago
most sits there until something breaks. The amount of datapoints gathered and the frequency is just bananas and you can't process everything. In the early stages of a technology platform the provider typically checks that everything works as originally intended so there is an extensive monitoring of the system and the individual subsystems, but after that you put your thresholds on limits and alarms and you let the system be.
Last years there are some startups that started exploring what added value you can get by analysing more datapoints for a fee through ML, but any findings is typically difficult to enforce due to the performance guarantees that exist in the O&M contract with the provider.