Digital BESS services M&A: Quinbrook sells optimiser Flexitricity, Fortescue’s analytics provider buys Zitara

Approval from the UK government is required for the acquisition to complete, and the UK energy regulator Ofgem has to assess the transaction, but these are the only remaining conditions for completion.

Quinbrook acquired Flexitricity in 2020 for £15.2 million, at which point Flexitricity had a contracted portfolio of 540MW flexible energy assets. 

Quinbrook said it has since overseen the business’ portfolio double to about 1.3GW distributed capacity. The investment manager also owns UK-based optimisation and trading platform Habitat Energy Limited, which it acquired a year after Flexitricity. 

That deal raised some eyebrows as an apparent duplication, but Habitat has a wider scope, operating in the US and Australian markets as well as the UK.

Flexitricity provides optimisation and route-to-market services to asset owners via its proprietary controls platform, which enables participation in the wholesale energy, balancing, and ancillary services markets, primarily in the UK.

It provides both front-of- and behind-the-meter solutions for grid-scale assets, as well as demand response services for over 900MW of operational assets, primarily battery energy storage systems (BESS), gas peakers, renewables, and demand-side response.

Drax said the Flexitricity acquisition supports its intention to develop a gigawatt pipeline of BESS comprising both physical assets and optimisation capability for third-party assets with the provision of route-to-market (RTM), floor and tolling structures. 

Through its Drax Energy Solutions business, the company already provides RTM for about 800MW of embedded third-party renewable assets. Much of its operations are in the UK, so the Flexitricity buy makes sense on that front, too.

To read the full version of this story, visit Solar Power Portal.

Fortescue’s Elysia software and analytics platform to integrate Zitara’s onsite controls

UK-headquartered battery intelligence platform Elysia, owned by Fortescue, will expand its services through the acquisition of US onsite controls company Zitara.

Zitara will be integrated into Elysia’s battery intelligence portfolio, with a focus on the battery energy storage system (BESS) market. 

Speaking exclusively to Solar Power Portal, managing director of Elysia Tim Engstrom described the move as “really connecting battery intelligence to battery action, from cloud to site”. 

“As we see it, the missing link in a lot of the battery intelligence stacks that you see in the market today is that the insights stay in the cloud”.

An arm of Australian-headquartered green technology, energy and metals company Fortescue, Elysia offers both cloud and embedded software to enhance battery performance, lifetime and safety across the automotive, heavy industry and stationary storage sectors. 

Zitara provides on-premise monitoring and control for grid-scale energy storage. In the same conversation with Solar Power Portal, co-founder of Zitara and the company’s executive vice president, Shyam Srinivasan, described the addition of Zitara to the Elysia stack as “a new vector”. 

Notably, where Elysia offers solutions for automotive and other applications, Zitara’s success has been in the battery chemistries and form factors prevalent in the large-scale storage space. 

“The BESS market doesn’t just need more web dashboards and analytics platforms to say something’s wrong, it actually needs a mechanism to go and act on that insight. And this is exactly what Zitara have with their Zitara for BESS product,” Engstrom added.

Zitara will continue to operate as a brand, folded into Elysia as a control layer. Srinivasan explained: “If we find a safety issue using an Elysia algorithm, instead of just turning a dashboard red somewhere, the way that analytics solutions do, we can shut down that rack and help trigger the process for a truck to roll out and attend to the unit.”

Fortescue will be among the first to take advantage of the full suite, deploying the Elysia-Zitara combo at its large-scale BESS installations in the Pilbara, Australia. Srinivasan said Fortescue is Zitara’s biggest deployment.

Zitara is already deployed at 100MW+ sites in Texas and has customers in Great Britain and Australia. Srinivasan said the company’s customers in those regions will see continued support “now with the power of Elysia behind us”.

To read the full version of this story, visit Solar Power Portal.

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