Large-Scale Battery Energy Storage Systems

As AI continues to advance and integrate into everyday applications, energy consumption is expected to surge, placing unprecedented pressure on the power grid. This talk explores how Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) can support the rapid expansion of data centers, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and sustainability. We will discuss the benefits of behind-the-meter (BTM) storage, examining how on-site battery solutions help facilities manage peak loads, reduce costs, and enhance resiliency.

Heavy-duty truck and bus electrification is driving demand for high-power charging that often exceeds existing grid capacity. This presentation examines how large-scale Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) enable multi-megawatt charging by reducing peak demand, improving resilience, lowering costs, and easing grid constraints. Through real-world deployments, attendees will gain practical insights into integrating energy storage with charging infrastructure to support scalable, reliable fleet electrification.

Power systems today face growing challenges to meet the needs of the future. These include technical challenges like declining system inertia, increasing requirements from the increasing use of variable renewable generation, and expectations for reliability across the power grid spanning centralized and edge of power grid. At the edge of the grid—in off-grid and electrically islanded environments—these constraints are even more acute, particularly when they need to support fluctuating, high-density AI workloads. Modern inverter-based storage systems can address these challenges. This presentation will unlock how to leverage modern inverter technology to solve these challenges, spanning business, regulatory, and technical considerations. Through strategic application of inverter technology, targeted services including frequency regulation, voltage support, black-start, and dynamic fault response, will enable dynamic, reliable, resilient operation to meet the evolving needs of the power grid. This presentation will highlight how to leverage modern inverter technology to support your critical power needs, and how it is enabling the energy transition—supporting both utility-scale grids and off-grid systems to reliably serve mission-critical loads, including next-generation digital and industrial infrastructure.

While EV battery design is aggressively optimized for high energy density, rapid peak power delivery, and high variable dynamic acceleration profiles, utility-scale energy storage systems (ESS) demand a radically different engineering paradigm. ESS applications prioritize ultra-long calendar life, absolute thermal safety, and structural resilience under thousands of deep, continuous daily cycles. In this talk, the cell-level design modifications, material breakthroughs, and supply chain shifts for ESS applications will be discussed.

Scaling grid storage with repurposed EV batteries requires precise degradation tracking. For LFP, a flat open-circuit voltage curve obscures cell aging. This presentation demonstrates how monitoring millivolt-level behaviors extracts gigawatt-hours of latent capacity. By combining physics-informed models with electrochemical state estimation, we resolve LFP and graphite phase-transitions. Operational data shows how these voltage signatures drive predictive aging forecasts and anomaly detection, unlocking safe operation beyond industry-standard warranties.

Reconfigurable battery systems allow the electrical connections among cells or modules to be dynamically adjusted during operation. The reconfigurability can bring benefits for large-scale battery systems, by enhancing safety, improved fault tolerance, energy utilization, service life, and flexibility in power delivery. In this talk, we will present major design pathways for realizing reconfigurable battery systems, discuss optimal power management to maximize the value of reconfigurability for applications, and highlight promising use cases in energy storage, electric aircraft, and multi-life systems

As large-scale BESS deployments accelerate, balancing safety and cost is increasingly important. This presentation explores the techno-economic implications of safer battery cell technologies, examining how safety investments impact system performance, project economics, and the total cost of ownership.

As "Foreign Entities of Concern" (FEOC) thresholds tighten through 2030, supply chain architecture becomes a competitive lever, not just a regulatory checkbox. We'll examine how sourcing FEOC-compliant BMS and control electronics reshapes the economics, cybersecurity posture, and time-to-market for large-scale BESS deployments. Case studies from North American and European OEMs show where domestic vs. premium-imported strategies create advantage.

Electrified mining haulage is proving out battery intelligence as a TCO lever—using embedded controls, cloud analytics, degradation forecasting, and reduced-order models to inform charging, dispatch, usable-energy margins, and maintenance. This talk shows how lessons from Fortescue’s mining operations translate to heavy trucking and other commercial fleets, where battery behavior must become operational decisions to improve uptime, asset life, and cost.

Electrifying ultra-heavy mining equipment was long considered beyond practical reach. This presentation explains how Fortescue leverages advances in battery chemistry, pack architecture, thermal, structural, and control design to redefine zero-emission heavy industry. Lessons from motorsport and high-performance electrification inform solutions for multi-megawatt duty cycles, harsh environments, and fleet-scale optimization, highlighting the architectural innovations needed to shift from diesel dependence to fully electric mine sites across global mining operations.

As the industry pushes toward electrification, hybrid battery systems are emerging as a practical stepping stone, especially for heavy-duty trucks where range, cost, and charging infrastructure remain major hurdles for full BEV adoption. The electrochemistry considerations, trade-offs, and performance requirements in cell design for hybrids differ from those of BEVs, which will be discussed in the context of the various levels of hybridization as investigated at Accelera.