Australia’s Energy Queensland, a government-owned distribution system operator, has partnered with cloud-based battery analytics provider ACCURE Battery Intelligence to monitor two 8MWh batteries in Queensland.
ACCURE Battery Intelligence, which employs AI-based battery safety and performance technology, will use its solution to optimise two 4MW/8MWh battery energy storage systems (BESS) located in Mundubbera and Torquay. Energy Queensland owns and operates both of these.
According to the two companies, ACCURE will use predictive battery analytics technology to monitor both the BESS sites 24/7 and detect and identify any equipment or operational problems that prevent the systems from running at peak performance.
The solution would also recommend corrective actions and track system performance before and after the changes are made.
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The two batteries are part of Energy Queensland’s wider 200MW/400MWh BESS network in the region, which is being used to soak up excess solar energy and distribute it to the grid at times of peak demand.
Kai-Philipp Kairies, CEO and co-founder of ACCURE believes the deal will help Energy Queensland to better utilise its solar resources and support grid reliability.
“Batteries are complex, and our job is to simplify that complexity and provide Energy Queensland with action-focused insights backed by data,” Kairies said.
ACCURE will be launching a new feature called inverter analytics. This solution will monitor the power conversion system (PCS) equipment at each site to prevent inverter failures, a common issue affecting the reliability of energy storage systems.
ACCURE’s growth from EVs to BESS
The German company, a spin-out from the research labs at RWTH Aachen University, initially offered its technology to the electric vehicle (EV) market before rapidly expanding into the BESS space.
Interest from the BESS market has seen ACCURE ink partnerships with several international clients. Last year the company agreed to monitor a fleet of large-scale battery storage systems in Germany for Iqony, a subsidiary of utility Steag.
The software has been onboarded at 90MW of Iqony’s grid-scale BESS assets across Germany, at six projects, each with a 15MW power output to the grid.
ACCURE is also using its predictive analytics platform to monitor and optimise the performance and reliability of a large-scale battery asset in New Mexico, US, for the asset owner, Spanish multinational energy company Repsol.
The company’s predictive analytics platform will continuously monitor Repsol’s 20MW/80MWh Jicarilla BESS project in the northern New Mexico Jicarilla Apache Nation indigenous community, located near a 62.5MW Repsol solar PV plant of the same name.
Battery warranties are ‘often complex’
As part of the deal with Energy Queensland, ACCURE will also implement its Warranty Tracker solution to guarantee that the BESS projects operate within the necessary parameters to prevent premature degradation.
This includes maintaining an appropriate temperature to prevent the batteries from overheating and ensuring that the project and its equipment remain covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.
The tracker was launched in December last year and can help prevent violations of warranty conditions. It can mitigate these violations by identifying operational issues that may cause a battery to exceed limits on things like temperature and voltage.
Battery warranties are a topic ACCURE Battery Intelligence has spoken to Energy-Storage.news about before, with Dr Kai-Philipp Kairies having said previously that these are often complex and inflexible and can add ‘prohibitive’ costs and risks for some asset owners. You can find the article in the Q4 2024 edition of our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (Vol.41).
