Episode 9 – How Smart is Your Battery Energy Storage System?

Kevin Sturmer 0:00
Coming up on Leading the Charge.

Avadhut Tayshete 0:02
The future is AI and ML, and that’s what I’m targeting right now. We have lot of algorithms where in AI and ML, where we have predictive analysis, we have lot of like, there is lot of stuff coming out. It’s quite interesting to learn new things. DSS doesn’t only hold about the IoT devices or am and but it also has the data analytics into place. It also has cyber security into place. If you look forward, it has blockchain as well.

Kevin Sturmer 0:30
This is Leading the Charge, where we talk innovation and insights in the industry of sustainable energy. Leading the Charge is brought to you by POWR2 – a global provider of energy storage solutions. Let’s simplify sustainability. And now from the POWR2 studio and broadcasting everywhere from LeadingtheCharge.io, here are your hosts, Tim Doling and Kevin Sturmer.

Welcome to Leading the Charge, where we talk battery energy storage, insights, innovation and the industry of sustainable energy. My name is Kevin, and I work in the marketing department of a company called POWR2, and with us, as always, is the incredible Tim doling. He is the Director of Innovation here at POWR2. How are you doing, Tim?

Tim Doling 1:13
Hey Kevin, good afternoon. I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Kevin Sturmer 1:16
So well, we have a great conversation today. It’s something we’ve touched on in prior episodes, but today we’re going to take a deeper look at it. And it’s really it gets to answering the question, How smart is your battery energy storage system? And it’s a very important question to examine. Yes.

Tim Doling 1:34
Oh, it’s so important. And I’m very excited for today’s episode. We’ve had some great guests on over the past few months, as we’ve been recording these podcasts external guests for the most part. But today we’re digging in and getting one of our in house experts, one of our engineering team, on the phone, and he’s going to go in and look at what sets our control system apart from what’s out there typically. So very excited to introduce our engineering team member here,

Kevin Sturmer 1:58
Absolutely. And as Tim mentioned, we welcome to the podcast Avadhut Tayshete, and he is the Senior Software Engineer here at POWR2, deeply involved in all of the things that we’ve talked about in terms of how that software can play an integral role in battery energy storage. He’s highly skilled in a number of computer languages and database structures, including the .net framework, Python, C#, Azure and so many more. A long list. You can find that list on his LinkedIn profile. We’ll have a link for that in the show notes as well. But welcome Avadhut, how are you doing today?

Avadhut Tayshete 2:32
Hi, Kevin, I’m doing good. Hi, Tim, how are you?

Tim Doling 2:35
Hi, Avadhut. Doing well.

Kevin Sturmer 2:36
Before we get to all of the energy management system, what inspires you as a software engineer, what makes that exciting for you?

Avadhut Tayshete 2:45
So I was, like, passionate about software engineering right from the beginning. So being a kid like I started with a computer, like opening up the computer, opening up the PCs. Then a long time back, you know, like when it was Microsoft Windows 97, XP. From that time I was like, kind of doing some stuff on the systems. Then it converted into predicting the logic for coding blocks. And then now, like, as you see, like, I’ve been working with any number of languages.net, framework, Python, working on cloud infrastructures for AWS, Azure, as well as on multiple databases like MongoDB, SQL and NOSQL as well.

Kevin Sturmer 3:25
How did that translate to ‘okay, I want to start working in energy storage.’ What are some of the challenges when building an energy management system?

Avadhut Tayshete 3:36
It’s definitely challenging to work on BSS units. So like to talk about. It’s all about the IoT devices. The future is AI and ML, and that’s what I’m targeting right now. We have lot of algorithms where, in AI and ML, where we have predictive analysis, we have lot of like, there is lot of stuff coming out. It’s quite interesting to learn new things. BSS doesn’t only hold about the IoT devices or AI / ML but it also has the data analytics into place. It also has cyber security into place. If you look forward, it has blockchain as well. So it’s, it’s a sea, you know, in I would not say, sea, it’s ocean.

Tim Doling 4:20
It’s obviously next level. It’s not not basic stuff, it’s not basic coding. But you’ve, you’ve mentioned a bunch of different things there. Could you just unpack those a bit more for those of us that are a bit more basic, what those things means? You mentioned AI, ML, IoT, all these things that go into the data analysis and data collection. Can you just simplify it just a little bit.

Avadhut Tayshete 4:41
So yeah, so we have our BSS units on site. So from those units, we collect the data into our databases. That’s basically done from nttp brokers, like nttps brokers, definitely the secured ones. Once we have the data points, we can do any number of things, because data is fuel in this generation. So based on that, we can develop our AI models. We can develop our machine learning models, or algorithms which can actually predict how our BSS system is working, if your battery cell has being discharging quite early, so why it’s been discharging? We can, we can get to those points. Earlier, before AI and machine learning, that was not possible. But now, as software industry has been moving forward towards this AI and machine learning, it’s very, quite, quite usual and quite simple, and it’s, it’s passionate work, you know, for me. So that that’s where, like AI driven optimizations come into picture. Now if you’re talking about the blockchain. So blockchain is something which is being already offered in different domains, but for BSS, it’s quite new. But this blockchain technology can have peer-to-peer energy trading, where we can have the market analysis of energy, and based on that, we can upload our energy from back to grids, or how we need to sell or we need to buy the energies that can happen from BSS. So that is one of the aspect of blockchain. Then we have cyber security, which is an important aspect right now, CrowdStrike and all this stuff. So cyber security, definitely, if you see, for the cybersecurity there are a lot of things from the BSS perspective, like blocking of ports, having the data encryption in place, moving the data from your IoT devices or from your BSS unit to the databases, and then from the databases which are on the cloud architecture to your portal. So all this data transformation needs to be secured. That’s what we are doing through ADVANTAGE like we are actually having those TLS 2.0 protocols, SHA-1 protocols in place. So this, actually it’s what we are doing.

Tim Doling 6:55
That’s so good. I mean, there’s so much there again, but just so we take it back up. So we you mentioned ADVANTAGE there. ADVANTAGE collects a lot of data points, doesn’t it? How many data points does ADVANTAGE collect?

Avadhut Tayshete 7:07
So as of now, around 150. 130 to 150 data points are there. But yeah, definitely, if required, we can increase those data points as well,

Tim Doling 7:17
And that covers anything from battery state of charge all the way through to state of health. How much power is being consumed all those type of data points? So about 150 data points. And how is that transferred securely?

Avadhut Tayshete 7:27
So with the help of HMAC SHA-1, we also have nttps broker, which actually transfers the data from your IoT devices to the MongoDB. We have MongoDB database at the back end. And from there, from MongoDB database, we have, like, there is a data logging auditing in place, how your data is moving from your IoT devices, to your tables, and from those tables to your portal. So all those things, if there is any data transformation happening at your back in even that is being recorded and audited.

Tim Doling 8:02
So if we were to try and visualize it, you have our device on the ground with the ADVANTAGE system connected. It’s collected – there’s 150 data points that’s transferred through a secure tunnel to the cloud, and at that point, you process that data using the means you were speaking about, the AI and machine learning, and it’s turned into a usable format for our customers. Is that…?

Avadhut Tayshete 8:23
Yeah, just like that

Tim Doling 8:25
So tell us then. So what’s the next step beyond that? We get it into our, so it comes from the advantage, which is on the machine, up to the cloud, into the portal. What happens to it then?

Avadhut Tayshete 8:34
Then there is data analytics in place. We have reporting in place. We have different charts. Are talking about the reporting like we have monthly reports like it depends like how you want to present your data. Once you have the data, you have the power, right? So it depends how you want to present your data and how you want to move ahead. So we have reporting in place where we can actually analyze all over, voltage, current, state of charge, battery, percentage for your units. All those parameters.

Kevin Sturmer 9:07
There are other data points that people quite often want to know and that we put right on the home page on that dashboard. Can you talk a little bit about those? Because when somebody’s looking they want to see the CO2, they want to see how much they’re saving in money, and the fuel savings and all of those benefits. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how that happens on the back end, and those kinds of special pieces of reporting that are quite popular?

Avadhut Tayshete 9:32
So basically, we have formulas which have been coded into the portal, and those formulas actually give us the CO2, the emissions, the fuel savings, and how much fuel has been utilized. Based on that, we also have the APIs, which actually gives you the daily rate of one gallon of fuel, or liter in your specific location. So based on that, we calculate how. Much savings has been done for that particular BSS unit, and in fact, we have a separate section on advantage, where you can post your savings, where you can post your CO2 carbon emissions, and all those things on social media.

Kevin Sturmer 10:14
It’s a little bit of social proof on how you’re making this transition to sustainability and how you are helping the world and what you kind of touched on it before, but can we talk about how much customization is actually possible, not only with reporting, but also with the ability, especially for those in the rental industry, the ability to group different projects. So if you’re renting three POWRBANKS or battery energy storage systems to one project and renting five to another, that reporting can actually be customized yet, can you, can you talk a little bit about that?

Avadhut Tayshete 10:53
Yeah, sure. So basically, we have different user profiles in our portal. We have, like, a system called as a groups, you know, or you can say as a cluster as well. So we can group your BSS unit based on the locations, based on the company, or where the company is actually renting those BSS units. So based on that, we can group those and based on those groups, we can actually generate the reports of that particular group. So if you take an example of 10 BSS units, where three were grouped for, Connecticut, four are grouped for North Carolina, in that way, so how much that particular location BSS units are performing, how they are performing? What are the weather conditions affecting those BSS units. All these analytics can be done, from the reporting of ADVANTAGE.

Tim Doling 11:46
And just just to play on into that also, there’s different levels of user login, is there? So that there’s, the customer can have a login and the owner can have a different login?

Avadhut Tayshete 11:57
Yeah. So basically, we have different user logins, where we have Super Admin. We have Company Admins. We have normal user who is just restricted to view the dashboard and everything. And we have also have users who are specific to remote access. As our portal give you the live remote access of your BSS unit. So if you create a user into your Company Admin, then that user can actually, like, just view specific reports so that control, you know, the complete monitoring control, you have it in ADVANTAGE, and that is being done with the help of user logins and the groupings where we can also group the, as I said, we can group the power banks together based on locations or the data power coordinates.

Tim Doling 12:47
That’s perfect. So if the asset or the battery, energy storage system goes to a different job site or a different location where there’s different staff that need to access it, you can grant new access permissions and take away old access permissions so that the previous users don’t have access to it. Which brings me to the point of alerts. So advantage, can give specific user alerts based on parameters. What type of parameters would they be?

Avadhut Tayshete 13:15
So you can actually customize all the alerts in ADVANTAGE, you can customize the message that your alert needs to like show on your system, on your screen, basically a different parameter. If you talk about the different parameters, those are like, state of charge, if when you need to turn from your normal grid to the solar, when you need to turn to the discharge, when the battery is discharging, when you need to turn to the battery. So all these alerts are being shown in the portal, ADVANTAGE portal, but yeah, these all things are customizable in advantage, like we can customize the messages anytime, and it’s completely in the admin’s hands, so we can customize that as as per is requirement.

Tim Doling 14:03
So really, they can have as many or as few reports as they want. So I have had people in the past say that their system generates too many alerts that are unnecessary. They’re just warnings or things that don’t really need to be monitored. But the, is automatically generated, so you almost it’s white noise and you forget about it. So we can customize this so you just get the alerts you need.

Avadhut Tayshete 14:23
Yeah.

Kevin Sturmer 14:24
When it comes to alerts, timing is always important, and also reporting. The timing is also important, something like an alert, how fast is that getting to your cell phone or getting to your tablet or email, and also with reporting, how often can, is the data collected, and then how often are the reports generated? What does that look like?

Avadhut Tayshete 14:46
So talking about a data collection, it’s 10 seconds, so it’s almost real time, I would say. So in this 10 seconds, there is actually a lot happening at the back end. The IoT devices are saying. Data to the database, and then we are showing it on the reporting section, okay. But this can also be lowered. Right now we have kept that frequency. So once the data collection is done, we have transformation in place, like you have this data collection, is in a raw format, right? Like, once you have this raw format, you need to do some transformations to get what exactly is needed for the reporting. It’s not going to be like you can’t show the raw data in the reporting. So there is a transformation happening at the back end. Once that transformation is done, we push that data to the reporting. Frequently used parameters like state of charge, state of l these are, like, current voltage. These are frequently used parameters. So we have those frequently used parameters where you can actually assemble your chart and keep it and whenever required you can, you can just add more parameters to it and use that. It’s kind of a template, you know, a runtime template which can be used to generate charts and reports quickly, and talking about the reporting frequencies, so we can, like, get the reports weekly, monthly, on the daily basis as well. So depends on how the user is actually requiring that. So it’s it’s all customizable, because this is our ADVANTAGE portal.

Tim Doling 16:17
Yes, so I did have some questions, just going back to what you said earlier about blockchain and how that can help an owner of energy storage systems to possibly make additional money. So I think you said it enables, did you say peer-to-peer trading, so that you can actually trade the electricity without a middleman? Is that what you said?

Avadhut Tayshete 16:33
Yes. So basically, peer-to-peer trading means you can trade the electricity the user or the consumer. Our consumer can actually gain profits from it. They can actually sell the electricity, if the electricity is required, or where there is a efficiency of electricity for the BSS, they can buy at that time. So blockchain can actually implement all those things. Definitely right now, blockchain is very new into this BSS, but yeah, this all things can happen, which means actually a trading and exchanging of electricity out here, you know, in the world, I would say, not in the particular location, but in the complete world.

Tim Doling 17:12
Yeah, exactly. So I find it particularly exciting because if, if I’m a rental company, so I’m trying to relate this to real world examples that we work in. So if I have a fleet of energy storage systems, they’re not all rented out, they’re sitting in the yard, this would enable me to buy energy when it’s cheapest. So if it’s if there’s a big solar array, it’s in the middle of summer, there’s some cheap electricity, or there’s a wind farm that’s over producing, there’s cheap electricity. And it enabled me to buy that and then sell it to an end user when the time is right for a profit. Is that? Is that how it would work?

Avadhut Tayshete 17:47
Yeah. So let me give you some live examples. Like, if you go to the Middle East, the sun there is like, it’s quite hotter there. So if you keep your BSS unit in somewhere in Middle East, or if you see in the places where sun is quite harsh, you can actually generate more energy. You can transfer that energy to somewhere in Canada where there is no sun, or where there is very low, low, low sun effect all over the world, you can transfer this energy,

Tim Doling 18:18
Yeah, that’s fantastic. So it just follows a demand response algorithm. Does it so it finds where the demand is needed and takes it from where the production is most prevalent?

Avadhut Tayshete 18:28
Yes. So, yeah, we can. We can play around with that demand and supply game. You know,

Tim Doling 18:33
For this type of demand response application, most people would envisage it would be much, much larger energy storage systems, multi, multi megawatt? Is there a use case for smaller, like single megawatt, or 10s of megawatts, where this could be used?

Avadhut Tayshete 18:48
Yes, there is a use case for small megawatts as well. So if you take an example where we have small BSS being placed at one location, and if you want to just supply 10 megawatts to back to the grid or to the some different BSS, I can do that in this case, like we can actually control that how much I need to supply out and how much supply in or demand I need to do that. So that that is quite possible with Blockchain, and this peer to peer energy transactions will be kind of a, you know, market trading or share trading, which we which we see in the real life. So it’s going to actually change the complete game in BSS.

Tim Doling 19:32
Yeah, I see a huge game changer. So another application, if I’m running a factory, like we do here, and I have energy storage to run the factory during the week, but we don’t actually work weekends. At the moment, that energy I have stored I can sell back to the grid when my demand is low, but there’s demand elsewhere. So it could be lucrative for the right operators.

Kevin Sturmer 19:51
And the blockchain is, for those who are not familiar, an immutable record, so it is not changeable and it is verifiable, and you. As blockchain quite often gets associated with crypto, but, but these transactions would probably just be using currencies that available in any specific country, correct?

Avadhut Tayshete 20:09
Yeah. And I forgot to mention one more point, like as we’re talking about the blockchain, we all know how secure it is, so there the security matters in this thing, and definitely it’s going to be a huge success when it’s once it’s comes into a picture and it’s been actually implemented.

Kevin Sturmer 20:27
With all of this data floating around. It is super important. It is the power of the future. Really. We’ve talked a little bit about redundancy on the podcast as well. How is this data backed up?

Avadhut Tayshete 20:37
Yeah. So we have the timelines where we need to archive the data on daily basis, on the monthly basis or on the yearly basis. So depends on that. But as we are generating huge amount of data, we archive those databases. We have set up these pipelines in place where each time on daily basis, if your data is being stored and you have reached like n number of records, then your this pipeline will start running, and it will archive your data into backup storage, you know, and whenever required for reporting or for getting any historical data points for reporting, or on the CSV formats or any testing formats, You can get those data points from your archival database and put it on your reports.

Kevin Sturmer 21:28
Wonderful to know, and then it’s always available. As we do with every episode, we end by answering some questions from our audience, and if you have a question you’d like to submit, you can send an email to [email protected] we had a recent webinar about our energy management software advantage and this question came up, can the ADVANTAGE portal integrate with third party SCADA systems and what communication protocols are supported?

Avadhut Tayshete 21:57
So yeah, definitely like ADVANTAGE portal supports third party SCADA systems. That’s true. Third party systems are using Modbus TCP. It means that, like ADVANTAGE, can communicate with other devices and systems. So basically, Modbus is helpful for communicating between the different devices. It’s their own language. Talking about different communication languages or protocols being supported other than Modbus, is like we are using IEC 61850, and DNP 3.0 as well. So if there is any communication problem, we can actually convert those. So there is a conversion factor as well in this where we can convert the languages and send it through DNP 3.0 and establish that communication easily, you know. So it’s quite possible, it’s, it’s, and we have actually implemented in one of the things where DNP 3.0 is being used, and we are converting from IEC 61850,

Kevin Sturmer 23:00
Wow. That is that is amazing to hear. And thank you. I appreciate the detailed answer, and hopefully that helps a lot of people in our audience. Whatever platform you’re on, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, leave a review to all of those wonderful, good things. And if you want to learn more, we have links to everything in our show notes. You can learn more about advantage. Learn more about Avadhut, learn more about everything. Just go and visit leadingthecharge.io. Our legal team wants me to say that any statements or views expressed by the hosts or guests on leading the charge are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of POWR2, their partners or affiliates. And finally, a big thank you, dude. Appreciate you joining us on the podcast and giving all of these software insights today.

Avadhut Tayshete 23:47
Thank you.

Tim Doling 23:48
Thank you very much.

Kevin Sturmer 23:49
And we know that your time is valuable, and appreciate you spending even a little bit of that time with us. So let’s simplify sustainability and keep leading the charge toward a world powered by sustainable energy. See you next time.