The growing complexity of managing battery-based assets requires top-level innovation you can trust, explains Abdelkrim Benamar, CEO of PowerUp.
Cloud-based analytics are becoming an essential tool for anyone using batteries at scale, whether in stationary energy storage or electric vehicle (EV) fleet applications.
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Electrification of the power and mobility sectors may experience some fluctuations in demand in the short term, but the overall trend is clear. In turn, the markets become more competitive.
To adapt and thrive in this new paradigm, owners, operators and investors need to be comfortable with scale: bigger assets and bigger portfolios, and the increase in asset management complexity requires more sophisticated and advanced battery analytics.
Analytics software is a layer of intelligence that enables users to know exactly what is going on in their batteries in real time. It offers deeper visibility into key metrics like battery health, lifetime and availability than monitoring at the battery management system (BMS) level can provide.
“A stationary battery energy storage system (BESS) has multiple layers of software that interact with each other. Battery analytics fits in between the BMS and the Revenue Optimisation layers,” explains Abdelkrim Benamar, CEO of battery analytics provider PowerUp.
“Using patented algorithms, PowerUp’s Battery Analytics platform, called Battery Insight, provides customers with accurate and actionable insights at site, container, rack and module levels, tracking dispersion and early signs of degradation. Battery Insight has proven to be capable of identifying the first signs of a future safety incident up to nine months in advance,” Benamar says.
Based on decades of research, PowerUp brings an innovative approach to AI-driven cloud-based analytics to the battery storage and electric vehicle markets.
“What is really important is that our algorithms are flexible and powerful enough to respond to key market requirements in both the stationary energy storage and mobility segments.”
Exciting times
PowerUp’s back story begins at CEA-Liten, one of Europe’s most prominent battery research institutes, from which the company was spun off. This means PowerUp draws on decades of battery and electrochemistry research, expertise, and a significant portfolio of intellectual property.
“The marriage of electrochemistry expertise and data science capabilities that catalysed our creation has been enriched with best-in-class developers able to build a customer-friendly and intuitive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform,” Abdelkrim Benamar tells us.
Since November 2024, PowerUp has been owned by Socomec, a family-owned and operated industrial group with a hundred-year history. Now, it is a leading player in products destined for the control and safety of low-voltage electrical networks.
There is also an important synergy between the analytics provider and its new owner: Socomec is highly active as a battery storage system integrator in the community-scale and commercial & industrial (C&I) markets.
“This is an important milestone for PowerUp as it ensures our long-term development with a powerful industrial partner,” Benamar says.
PowerUp remains dedicated to its historical markets and customers—typically owners and operators of utility-scale BESS assets in the stationary storage segment, and owners and operators of fleets of electric vehicles in the mobility segment.
“This newfound proximity with Socomec opens up additional synergies across all their business lines using Li-ion batteries—enhancing performance, efficiency, and safety for many more customers,” Benamar adds.
Awareness of the power of analytics is spreading fast
There is an increasing awareness of the role of data and software that smartly applies insights from that data to improve the performance, safety, and availability of battery storage systems.
Abdelkrim Benamar says that the “unique positioning” of battery analytics between the system’s optimisation and BMS layers has, in turn, led to increased awareness of the ways that analytics enable data to be leveraged in optimising the life and operation of battery storage.
In essence, the preventive maintenance capabilities for safety and performance optimisation create a bridge between asset managers and optimisers to find the best trade-off between asset health or lifetime and revenue maximisation, he explains.
PowerUp is itself playing an important part in both advancing innovation in analytics and customer understanding of what its features can empower them to do.
Benamar notes examples such as PowerUp’s state-of-charge (SOC) measurement accuracy and AI-enabled HVAC anomaly detection, which, along with other key safety features in the Battery Insight package, “have contributed to a greatly increased industry interest in testing and implementing battery analytics solutions in best-performing BESS software suites.”
“Also, it is now increasingly common to see owners and operators of BESS assets get support from our battery analytics capabilities during the commissioning phase, as it is so important to identify and solve technical issues efficiently and start generating revenues as fast and reliably as possible,” he says.
Analytics providers are service assurance specialists for batteries
Whether customers’ assets are stationary or on wheels, managing key performance indicators (KPIs) is complicated. Charge, capacity, resistance and temperature can all interact, making the optimisation of a battery asset in tandem with ensuring safety a balancing act that the CEO likens to “juggling on a highwire”.
“One inefficient module can impact negatively on all the others and lock tradeable capacity and associated revenues,” he says.
“This reminds me of the emergence of service assurance companies and solutions in the telecommunications industry: when large OEMs and solution integrators sell to large asset owners and operators, the market always calls for unbiased specialists able to assist with preventive maintenance and anomaly detection capabilities.”
“Those specialists are innovation-driven, with fast and focused R&D giving them an edge on larger organisations and a proven ability to add value to the larger ecosystem. What we see happening in the battery value chain is quite similar.”
PowerUp is one of those specialists that customers should seek out, while its new shareholding structure and backing from a blue-chip company like Socomec gives it the perfect platform to grow.
“There are synergies that will be created from this unique positioning with our sister companies to foster increased BESS system-wide ‘intelligence inside’ features. These will benefit Socomec’s, but also PowerUp’s customers in the BESS and e-mobility segments,” Abdelkrim Benamar says.
“We are well prepared to tackle any lithium-ion battery system, as well as present and future implementations of solid-state and sodium-ion batteries: we are set for the future!
We will continue to grow internationally while staying true to ourselves, retaining our customer-centric culture and the feeling that we contribute to the success of sustainable goals even at times of geopolitical headwinds.”
Learn more about PowerUp Technology at https://powerup-technology.com/, connect via the LinkedIn page and you can send enquiries to [email protected]
