Is your Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Future-Ready?
As demand for renewable energy continues to rise, so do the challenges and expectations of BESS. Celestica can help.
While the future is bright for BESS-enabled power solutions, the rapidly increasing demand for raw materials, cell production, and final product assembly is expected to drive significant capacity gaps in the energy storage supply chain. Combined with increased market expectations for enhanced battery functionality and optimized cost, the need for rapid BESS design optimization and risk mitigation has been pushed to the forefront.
To remain competitive, BESS companies must be prepared to expertly navigate through emerging challenges and expectations to speed their product designs to market. Below, we discuss three emerging trends that are shaping the transition to renewable energy solutions and will enable BESS companies to get future-ready.
1: Outsourcing hardware to focus on advanced software solutions in-house
Today, BESS companies are increasingly outsourcing component and systems assembly to focus on implementation of advanced software solutions to manage the overall system. By enhancing performance and enabling predictive maintenance, cloud solutions and predictive models are becoming increasingly important – and often present a more lucrative and future-focused business opportunity for OEMs in the sector.
“The hardware or physical asset itself is transitioning away from center stage to being one part of a broader solution,” explains Anton Fischer, Technical Business Development, Industrial and Smart Energy. “As a result, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are assessing what is core vs non-core to their business operations and long-term success. Many may choose to outsource hardware manufacturing – shifting their focus to software-enabled service offerings that prepare them to stay competitive and deliver high value to customers.”
The addition of intelligent software into products is a significant advancement for BESS. It enables OEMs to gather important performance insights, predict the degradation of the system, and ultimately increase the energy throughput during the service life of energy storage products. It also allows OEMs to optimize next-generation products based on the data they collect from deployed systems.
It’s important to note that actioning software-driven insights to increase BESS performance can take a range of forms. An emerging trend with direct implications on product hardware is the increased granularity of data used in optimization. This is driven by increasing expectations around the number of cycles that battery cells can provide and results in the addition of power conversion elements at the rack level or module level. Whether this is AC/DC or DC/DC power conversion, it allows for tailoring of the charge/discharge cycles to ensure that the cell State of Health (SoH) in a given rack is accurately measured and predicted over an ever-increasing calendar and cycle life.
2: The shift to Liquid Cooling Solutions for more efficient performance
As the industry’s expectations of battery efficiency and life expectancy grow, so does the need for OEMs to effectively manage total cost. This has led to OEMs focusing heavily on improving overall energy density and a growing trend toward increased battery cell size. Such enhancements require new and effective ways of regulating cell temperature – for performance, safety, and reliability. This is driving a significant and pervasive shift towards liquid cooling across the energy sector since it removes heat more effectively than air cooling.
Liquid cooling enables a more cost-effective and efficient BESS when greater levels of energy density are required, and it significantly improves battery cycle time when using higher capacity battery cells. The larger the battery, the more essential an effective cooling solution becomes.
Liquid cooling is directly tied to the growing focus on driving overall incremental gains in the energy density of BESS – whether through the steady rise in cell energy density, the increasing number of racks in a container or the reductions in auxiliary system volume. All of these approaches augment the volumetric energy density, reduce the footprint, and reduce the cost per kilowatt hour on an installed system basis. Together, they can provide a significant competitive advantage to OEMs in the race to capture market share.
“BESS OEMs are challenged with embedding higher-density capabilities and liquid cooling solutions into their next-gen product designs and then quickly producing them at scale without compromising on safety and reliability,” says Maggie Zhang, Senior Staff Engineer, Mechanical Design. “Celestica’s tailored cooling and heating solutions help OEMs keep up with the rapid pace of change. Our services encompass the accurate selection of suitable chillers and the optimization of cooling system layouts -- ensuring optimal operating temperatures for batteries and electronic components, and mitigating the risk of hot spots and internal overheating.”
3: Reshoring Supply Chains
More than ever before, supply chains face greater threats of disruption which can be devastating to a company’s bottom line. The BESS industry, like many others, is reshoring supply chains to manage the potential risk. This involves increasing local and regional manufacturing as well as production which can offer significant advantages to the OEM; improved time-to-market, reduced transportation costs, improved quality control, supply chain resilience, and intellectual property protection among others.
Government incentives such as the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and EU domestic content incentives also help countries to meet clean energy targets with locally produced products - reducing carbon footprints and boosting local economies. These advantages collectively contribute to a more robust, efficient, and secure supply chain.
The best opportunity to succeed at mitigating supply chain disruptions begins at the very early stages of product design. Early engagement between engineering and supply chain teams during the design phase can enable the right sourcing and localization strategy to drive a successful product ramp, improve production planning, demand forecasting, and supply chain resilience. By adopting a Design for Supply Chain methodology during the design phase, with a focus on localization, an experienced manufacturing partner like Celestica can help anticipate and manage risks, strike the right balance of local and global suppliers, and leverage buying power to support mass production.
Scaling your BESS from prototype to production with Celestica
As a trusted partner to several of the world’s leading energy storage OEMs, Celestica helps future-focused companies rapidly incorporate the latest BESS innovations into their product designs.
With more than a decade of renewable energy expertise, we enable products that generate, convert, control, and monitor energy. We know the unique challenges of building integrated systems that operate flawlessly. Whether you are building a customized energy storage system or moving towards emerging market standards, Celestica can help you scale cost competitively, quickly, and with lower risk supply chains. We can help meet your demands today and work alongside you to build a forward looking strategy for tomorrow.
Our proven approach with global expertise spanning design, engineering, prototyping, manufacturing, and regulatory and safety considerations can accelerate your BESS product roadmap and provide custom solutions tailored to your unique needs.
Want to stay ahead of rapidly emerging trends?
Our Smart Energy team is ready to help you optimize the cost, performance, safety, efficiency, and lifespan of your product.
Together with our customers, we are powering a green and sustainable future. To learn more, connect with our Smart Energy team today to learn how Celestica is enabling successful residential, commercial and industrial, and utility scale BESS applications.