Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Systems

Helping companies exploit the rich data held in the underlying battery, inverter and other equipment

Safe, efficient and cost-effective edge solutions

Edge software is helping the providers of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) deliver safer, more efficient, and cost-effective solutions to their customers.

Edge computing is delivering competitive advantage, innovation, and product differentiation which is fundamental to creating successful commercial offerings that resonate with customers and help Battery Energy Storage System vendors capture market share.

Renewable Energy and Battery Energy Storage Systems

Operational Benefits

By gathering, standardizing, and then exploiting the rich data held in underlying battery, inverter, and other equipment control systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems can benefit from:

I OTech Edge Central is an open edge data platform that forms the basis of BESS data acquisition and enterprise-level data mining and analysis; providing real-time control capability, with edge management for ease of maintenance and version control capability for the BESS portfolio of products.

Technical Challenges

Battery Energy Storage System vendors need to build and deliver capabilities quickly, in a repeatable fashion, and in a cost-effective and non-proprietary way.

Vendors can choose and easily integrate energy products from a variety of equipment suppliers to, for example, maximize energy density, and create the most appropriate overall hardware and software solution for each of their customers or customer sites.

Professional Services

Key Benefits of the IOTech Solution:

Supports seamless data acquisition/control with the lower-level BMS, EMM, and PCS systems
High flexibility to adapt to the different battery and inverter vendors each with potentially different site configurations
Edge data normalization to the industry-standard SunSpec information model
Data fusion, system control logic, and data visualization at the edge
Longer-term data historian/analytics functions and reporting
Reduced development costs and time to market for new IoT capabilities
Simple integration into 3rd party software stacks

Customer Example: A leading supplier of utility-scale battery energy storage systems

Challenge: Various operational data points need to be obtained from battery racks and associated equipment, and analyzed at the edge (e.g., for alarms, shutdowns, etc.) and the solution also needs orchestration management across multiple sites and customers.

Solution: Universal OT connectivity layer in IOTech Edge Central is used to collect the data for further process which then implements a variety of rules on the ingested data, for example, to detect abnormal conditions and, if necessary, raise alarms or shut down equipment. These calculations must be done at the edge since quick and reliable actions are imperative. Data is also sent to various endpoints such as SCADA systems. IOTech’s Professional Services team was instrumental in configuring the system and adding several product extensions during the solution development phase as well as supporting the development of the edge rules processing logic.

Benefits:

Use Case: Edge Manager in Battery Energy Storage Systems

Challenge: Efficiently deploy, configure, and manage a new generation of edge applications in BESS.

Solution: Edge Manager’s multi-tenancy and platform independence offer scalability and flexibility across deployments and can enable use cases such as remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, energy optimization, and safety compliance. Overall, it plays a key role in efficiently managing energy operations.