Episode 179 | Cloud Confidence | ACCURE Battery Intelligence
Energy storage is critical if we want more renewable energy on the grid. And lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries, responsible right now for most of the new storage capacity, need to stay healthy.
“The weakest cell in that serial connection will also limit your overall performance,” says Kai-Phillip (KP) Kaires, Co-Founder and CEO of ACCURE Battery Intelligence. “That means one bad apple can really impact an entire site.”
Each Li-ion cell contains a chip that broadcasts its voltage, current and temperature. The bad news is that most battery management systems (BMS) ignore it. Cells are grouped into modules, modules are stacked into racks, and racks make up the battery energy storage system (BESS). The BMS, he explains, sometimes only monitors data at the rack level. If there’s a problem with the individual cell, it’s buried within two hierarchies of data.
KP saw this during his time working on early BESS projects. “[BESS developers] just didn’t care about the data. No one was using it. And there was so much value in it, obviously,” he says. He formed ACCURE in 2020 to monitor this data from the cloud. ACCURE essentially “piggybacks” on existing data flows from a BMS. From there, they can pinpoint batteries that may be in danger of degrading the racks or even thermal runaway.
In addition to safety and reliability, ACCURE has found itself helping BESS developers get the most out of their financial performance. In some markets, as much as 10% of a BESS site’s revenue can be earned in a single day (i.e. an ice storm with several outages across the grid). KP says developers now approach them before a project begins to serve as a “sanity check” as developers are evaluating which modules to use.
“We really like to be involved before a system goes live so that we can set everything up in the right way to reduce ambiguity in the long term,” he says. ACCURE’s Customer Success team will even provide data to their customers to facilitate warranty claims on defective batteries.
KP says the company is currently focused on building its core business with Li-Ion stationary storage projects. They have begun work with marine and automotive companies as well.
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