Battery Energy Storage (BESS) Site Monitoring Software

This demo shows how sensors can be used to watch over an unmanned battery energy storage system (BESS) site, with battery containers, inverters, a step-up transformer, the grid connection and a control building. The monitoring runs independently of the battery management system (BMS) and SCADA. We have set up 9 physical and 4 virtual sensors. The virtual sensors read alarms directly from the BMS, inverters, HVAC units and UPS. Select each one to see the alarm condition, the readings, and the alert sent to your engineers and control room by SMS and email over the monitoring unit's own 4G/5G link. Engineers can log in over a secure VPN to see live readings, and alerts can also go into your SCADA or network management system by SNMP or Modbus. Smoke and security alarms also set off a siren and strobe on site. We show 13 sensors here, but most clients start with one or more of the most important: off-gas detection, fire suppression status and container temperature.

Typical BESS Site Problems

Battery storage sites are usually unmanned and often remote, so problems need to be picked up early and passed to the right people straight away. Serious incidents rarely happen without warning signs that automated monitoring could have picked up. A failing lithium-ion cell gives off hydrogen and carbon monoxide before it smokes or catches fire, which gives a valuable early warning of thermal runaway. HVAC faults and heatwaves push container temperatures up, causing the BMS to derate the batteries just when output is most valuable. Fire suppression systems can be left isolated after maintenance, and damaged cable glands let water into containers. Inverter trips, transformer overheating and grid outages cut output and revenue, while a failed auxiliary supply can leave the controls, fire panel and comms running on a UPS with limited runtime. Energy sites are also targets for intruders and copper cable theft. Our systems capture data, compare it automatically with thresholds and send alerts to predefined contact lists over an independent 4G/5G connection. That gives you time to respond, protect the site and keep it trading.

AKCP Quicklime Monitoring Software

Quicklime is a powerful, centralised monitoring and management platform for remote battery energy storage systems, from AKCP. The software provides a single user interface for monitoring sensor data collected from AKCP sensorProbe+ base units such as the SPX8, from across your infrastructure, helping you to quickly identify environmental, power, cooling and security issues. The software has several price levels which reflect the number of sensors (physical and virtual) being monitored through to connection to an AI model for sensor data analysis.