Wärtsilä debuts software solution for BESS users

Technology group Wärtsilä has launched GEMS Pulse, a predictive analytics solution designed to transform complex and largely inaccessible battery and operational data from energy storage facilities into actionable insights, enabling asset owners to make smarter asset usage decisions throughout the lifecycle of the system.

GEMS Pulse is designed to transform complex data from energy storage facilities into actionable insights. (Photo: Wärtsilä)

As Wärtsilä noted, many energy storage asset owners leave a significant portion of total capacity unused — often up to as much as 20% — as a buffer against uncertainty in battery cell health and available energy metrics. GEMS Pulse is designed to help owners reclaim that margin by providing high-confidence measurements of available energy, cell imbalance and degradation.

GEMS Pulse uses a single, intuitive interface for monitoring and managing complex energy storage systems. The solution’s tech stack integrates insights from millions of operating batteries and billions of hours of performance data across Wärtsilä’s global energy storage fleet, and combines it with the company’s in-house team of battery science PhDs, two U.S. labs for real-world battery behavior testing and real-time control of batteries in the field.

Key features include:

• Forecasting tools that model how decisions impact long-term energy storage system health and cost
• Insights into how the asset is tracking against contractual guarantees
• Intelligent anomaly detection to pinpoint underperforming cells and components and help asset owners to act quickly and confidently to prevent failures

By continuously monitoring for anomalies, GEMS Pulse identifies potential issues before they impact availability. The solution can also equip operators with real-time data to simulate dispatch strategies and evaluate outcomes before deployment. Combined with flexible performance guarantees, operators can optimize battery usage for their strategic goals, with intelligence around constraints such as cycles per day, depth of discharge, CP rating (continuous power rating) and operating temperature.

“We built GEMS Pulse to solve the problems of today’s asset owners: asset availability, maximized capacity to meet rising energy demands and the bottom line,” said Ruchira Shah, general manager of Software Product Management for Energy Storage at Wärtsilä. “We are empowering customers to access and understand their own data. This is a meaningful competitive edge in a fast-changing energy market.”

Already in use by Wärtsilä’s energy performance services team, to date GEMS Pulse has optimized over 9 GWh of battery capacity within the company’s portfolio, helping customers improve performance, uptime and state-of-charge accuracy.