Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are becoming essential for advancing renewable energy, allowing excess power produced during low-demand periods to be stored and used when demand increases. As adoption grows, so do the associated engineering hurdles, especially in thermal design. Ineffective thermal management can hinder a system’s ability to release heat during peak usage, resulting in diminished performance, potential financial penalties, and reduced battery longevity. These challenges are even more significant in hot climates, where systems must manage the discharge of large amounts of energy under already extreme conditions.
Experiences from early BESS deployments have shown that neglecting thermal considerations during the design phase can lead to expensive performance issues and system failures. As a result, more companies are turning to simulation to better understand and predict system behavior before construction. When applied early, simulation enables engineers to detect potential thermal problems, lower the risk of costly post-installation fixes, and support more effective capital planning. In this way, simulation has become a vital tool for enhancing system reliability and performance while also protecting the long-term value and financial success of large-scale energy storage projects.
Below is a transcript from a recent video interview with Rand Simulation’s Consulting Division Manager Christopher Smith
When the thermal design on a BSS site is poor, oftentimes what that means is that during peak electricity demand, the site isn’t able to dissipate enough energy to meet that demand, which can produce fines or other things for the providers that reduce the profitability. Additionally speaking, it can reduce the lifespan of the batteries, meaning that those sites aren’t going to be operating as long as they may be anticipated to.
Hi, my name is Chris Smith from Rand Simulation, and I’m going to be talking to you today on battery energy storage systems. BSS is a large, growing industry because of a lot of demand for energy storage, right? We’ve got a lot of renewable energy technology, generating stuff off peak time, and we need to leverage that energy. And the issue is, since it’s a new technology, it’s running into a lot of engineering problems. Most of those engineering problems are related to thermal design of the sites.
Christopher Smith, Rand Simulation
At the end of the day, we’re not used to discharging 1000s of kilowatts of energy from batteries out in the hot desert. You a lot of these companies that are designing and implementing BESS sites initially weren’t using simulation, but on the implementation of a lot of those designs, they were seeing early failures, and so they started working with simulation companies to try and better predict the performance of their BESS sites, because obviously these are massive capital investments to implement a site, and so they wanted to start to integrate ways that they could reduce the risk of those sites not meeting their performance metrics.
So there are instances where leveraging simulation early on can really help minimize the risk that you’ll have to implement remediation solutions, and that can cost upwards of $10-20 million to implement after a site is already installed.
So beyond preventing failures, simulation really helps guide that capital planning and reliability for the grid by ensuring that you’re going to be seeing the exact performance out of your site that you’d expect right failures are much broader than one single unit failing or a couple of units on a site, because there are 1000s of them, and so simulation can help ensure that you have a lot of predictability in when you could expect to see issues with that site, and the magnitude of those potential issues that can make sure that those greater liability and capital planning are no longer concerns. They’re de risked. I’m Chris Smith from Rand simulation, and thank you for joining me today to talk about battery energy storage systems.
