Energy storage has moved past the pilot stage. It’s now part of long-term grid resource plans. The focus is shifting from which battery to buy to how to run, integrate, and optimize storage assets over 10, 15, or 20-plus years.

In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, I’m joined by Ryan Franks, Business Development Manager for Energy Storage. We discuss what utility-grade energy storage means and why it matters to utilities and independent power producers.

Ryan describes the “third wave” of energy storage. In this wave, flexible platforms let owners choose the components they prefer, rather than relying on custom on-site builds or closed integrator systems. He explains why managing a fleet instead of single projects calls for one common operator interface, much like airline pilots who can fly any plane in the fleet. He also covers why storage data is so valuable and why owners are taking charge and discharge decisions in-house. Finally, he looks at how storage is being added to solar, wind, and combustion turbine sites that serve data centers.

You’ll also learn:

• How controls support performance, safety, and warranty discussions with vendors
• How to plan for degradation, augmentation, and the timing of battery replacement
• Four ways data analytics and AI improve operations and maintenance
• What will set successful projects apart over the next five years

Learn more

• Ovation Battery Energy Management System
• Ovation Green Solar PV and Battery Energy Storage Solutions (PDF)
• Ovation Green

Transcript

Jim: Hi everyone, this is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Today we’ll be exploring how the energy storage market is evolving beyond battery chemistry and technology selection. I’m joined by Ryan Franks, an expert in utility-grade energy storage. As energy storage deployments grow in scale and complexity, we’ll discuss how operators run, integrate, and optimize these assets over time. Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks, Jim. Great to speak with you today.

Jim: It’s great having you to discuss this. Let’s start with discussing how this whole market is changing. So when we talk about the evolution towards utility-grade energy storage, what does that mean, and what’s driving that shift today?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple of trends that are really driving that mentality of shifting from being at energy storage, being a trial and being a pilot to having a true purpose, having a lot of accepted use cases. And one of the things that distinguishes utility-grade energy storage from residential or commercial energy storage and other past concepts is the ability for it to be serviced and maintained over the entire project lifespan, 10, 15, 20-plus years.

Jim: Wow, that’s pretty significant going over that kind of lifespan. And I guess as storage projects become larger and more interconnected, how are customer priorities changing beyond simply selecting the right battery technology?

Ryan: Right, so from a controls perspective, what people are seeking, what the utility and independent power producers are seeking, is a complete package where you have an open box, you’re transitioning from a black box architecture where you didn’t have any insight into the tuning parameters, you didn’t have any access to all of the data, to bringing some of that in-house. You know, you mentioned going from a project to an interconnected fleet standpoint. And there’s a couple of things that play into that.

One of the things is that I’d like to describe energy storage as being in the third wave of things. The first wave was really when things were built on site. You had a lot of different components that were brought in, and everything was custom engineered. You had an energy storage block, you had an inverter, you had a lot of on-site work. And that was just how things had to be done at the beginning of energy storage, about 15, modern energy storage, about 15 years ago. The backlash to that was that people needed one, people said one neck to choke, one party that was responsible for the delivery of the project.

And that gave rise to the second wave, the integrator class. You saw a lot of entities pop up that were providing fully-fledged systems and turnkey systems. Now, we’re in the third wave, which has been going on for a couple of years, I would say since about mid-COVID or so. And a lot of that is in response to supply chains and having flexibility. This is the wave of flexible energy storage, where you come and you have a vendor network, and you have parties that have worked together, that have executed together.

But you may, as a customer, may very well have certain preferences as to what inverter you use. Maybe you’ve used a bunch on a different energy storage projects, different solar projects. Maybe you’re operating in a country or region that doesn’t have great customer service and is a long way away from the offices of that inverter supplier, something like that. It’s platforms that allow default options, but also the ability to substitute in components and preferences to suit the specific application of the project.

Jim: Yeah, it sounds like the challenges ramp up a little bit as you’re kind of moving from individual assets to fleets. So, what new operational challenges emerge when organizations move from managing, say, a single storage asset to managing a portfolio or fleet of these assets?

Ryan: Right. I like to think of it in terms of an airplane. So if you get on a commercial airliner, chances are that those two pilots, the pilot and the first officer, have not flown together, or they have flown together very little. It’s also entirely possible that those two people have not set foot in that plane before the flight that you’re taking. But it’s an operational platform where the individuals, the operators, have that knowledge. They have the communication structure, they have the knowledge, and they have the insight to be able to operate whatever is put in front of them.

And that’s a lot like energy storage fleets because you need personnel that are trained in how to respond to one interface, so that you’re not dealing with redundant training on multiple different interfaces. Having a strategy that really thinks less in terms of projects and one-off designs and more in terms of a system strategy and interoperability is definitely one of the trends that’s occurring.

Jim: Yeah, that’s a really good analogy. Imagine you’re a pilot, every plane you went into had a whole different cockpit and everything was in different spots. It’d be a challenge to work with all that. So what kind of visibility do operators need to understand how these assets are performing? I guess not just today, but over their full life cycle.

Ryan: One of the things that plays into utility-grade energy storage and the transition from projects to fleet and visibility is this concept of bringing responsibilities of the operation and the design in-house. Now, utilities have self-performed on a lot of different assets for a long time, and that’s increasingly becoming the case with energy storage. For independent operators and IPPs, There’s a whole spectrum out there where you might have just a few individuals, a small team that’s mostly financial oriented, or you might have a full suite of services including engineering, procurement, all the functions of an IPP that exist.

What’s occurring now is bringing a lot of those decision-making scenarios under the responsibility of the asset owner or operator. As an example, A lot of contemporary EMSs that are designed for energy storage provide the option, and maybe the mandate in some markets, to own the decisions on charging and discharging. When I’m going to take energy from the grid into my energy storage system, when I’m going to discharge, when I’m going to put energy onto the grid from my energy storage system. And that has its benefits, right?

Because you have some liability protection, you have some cover as to I’m going to rely upon this expert set of automation that the company that you’re contracting with really has a deep expertise in. But it also has the disadvantage because you then need to completely rely upon them and you don’t have ownership over those charging and discharging decisions. So by bringing it in-house, you’re creating a lot more, a lot of a higher ceiling of revenue capabilities, a lot more possibilities and not putting yourself into a box.

Now, the second thing that I’ll talk about with visibility is I’m going to provide another analogy for you. So we’re recording this right now in October of 2026 and the World Series is taking place. Energy storage is a lot like baseball, whereas other energy generation assets are a lot like football, basketball, other team sports. The difference is that you have all of these discrete components. There’s a reason why you have all of these statistics around baseball. You have a bunch of discrete events that have been done a lot of different times that you can build a statistical profile out of them. Whereas in other generation assets, like team sports, when you score a touchdown or when you score a basket in basketball, it’s a lot more of a team effort. There’s a lot more going on.

So in energy storage, you have all of these digital pieces of information. And that data is gold. You can do a lot of things in terms of improving safety, improving performance, finding the root cause of issues when you get down to that very granular discrete event data.

Jim: You’re on a roll with these analogies. I like it. We got the cockpit. We got baseball. This is good. I guess as energy storage increasingly operates alongside renewables and conventional generation, I guess more and more that’s happening. What does effective integration look like in practice?

Ryan: Yeah, so there’s A couple of different trends that are driving energy storage adoption. I mean, obviously for the past few years, you’ve seen a lot of standalone energy storage projects. And a lot of that was really due to a couple of years ago, changes in tax treatment of them that allowed them to be more advantageous, more likely to pencil out in terms of long-term ownership. In addition to that, though, you see energy storage entering a lot of hybrid applications now.

So first, you see, of course, solar and wind, a lot of existing renewable sites that are integrating energy storage alongside that existing asset class in order to comply with new grid code requirements in order to better serve the technical requirements that exist around that project.

The second thing, aside from renewables, is very interestingly, you see a lot of power plants that are transitioning from purely maybe merchant operation into more of a purchase power agreement scenario. And because of that, they’re serving data centers. Data centers are all about SLAs, or service level agreements.

And so you see energy storage, and especially energy storage coupled with GFMs or grid-forming inverters, being put into those existing combustion, traditional combustion sites. In order to get the plant back up sooner and increase the power service level agreement that they’re contracted with for that data center.

Jim: Yeah, it does seem data centers are driving a lot of changes across there. That’s a really good example of how you couple it with traditional energy production there.

Ryan: I mean, one more thing on this is that, you know, again, I can’t emphasize enough that energy storage for the longest time, right, up until a couple of years ago, I would say, basically those first two waves that I talked about, the built-on-site and the integrator wave, energy storage was trying to find its place. It was positioned as an alternative to gas turbines. It was presented as an alternative to rapid shutdowns. It was presented as the possibility of doing really fast frequency response. And all of that is absolutely true. But there’s enough energy storage now that it’s not some sort of experimental asset that’s being guided by the innovation department of a utility or the research department of an independent power producer. It’s truly integrated into and respected as part of the grid and integrated into the long-term resource plans of all of these entities.

Jim: Well, that’s a really good point. That’s good background. And let’s shift the conversation a little bit to the automation side. How can automation and controls help operators coordinate these different resources while maintaining reliable and predictable operations?

Ryan: Yeah, so really I like to think of this in terms of three different categories. One is performance, Two is safety, and the third is warranty adherence. So again, energy storage is unique in that it’s this truly digital asset. It’s generating all of this data. Now, what you’ve seen, and there’s a couple of recent EPRI [Electric Power Research Institute] papers over this that if you go to EPRI.com and search for ESIC, the Energy Storage Integration Council, There’s a great wealth of knowledge there.

There’s a couple of different reports, I hopped out on one of them a couple years ago, that look at the safety trends and the performance trends of energy storage in the United States. Now, what you’ve clearly seen is that there are two things occurring. One, safety has drastically improved. Safety was really the primary challenge and the primary headwind in a lot of cases for energy storage for many years. This followed events like the well-documented Surprise, Arizona fire and explosion and several different fires that occurred in South Korea.

That was largely due to batteries having manufacturing defects, right? What you’ve seen now is that there has been just a really massive decrease, and there’s also been a really massive increase in the number of deployments of energy storage. So the percentage of energy storage systems that are affected by a safety incident is way down.

Now, the other thing that’s occurring is that performance in terms of degradation is turning out to be way less of an issue than many people thought that it would. When you were first deploying lithium-ion energy storage systems, there was a real question out there of how do I make this bankable? How do I think about if this project is going to last a certain number of cycles? Because it just simply hasn’t existed for that many cycles, that number of years, that I don’t have a bank of evidence to do this. And now we’re reaching that point where systems have been out in the field; a lot of systems have been out in the field for 10-plus years. And the degradation is better than expected, meaning that it is degrading slower than a lot of people anticipated.

So to get back to your original question, I know that’s a little bit of a roundabout, but to get back to your original question, performance is the thing to solve for right now. And what I mean by performance is for revenue-generating systems, right? If you’re in a merchant operation, you need to have your system online to the greatest extent possible. And with energy storage, there’s all sorts of things that can potentially pop up.

Imbalance issues, inverter outages, over-temperature events, automatic shutdowns of some sort. You know, these are low-probability but high-impact events. And by using all of that data coordinated through a control system, you can do a couple of different things. You can spot problems early in terms of safety and performance.

You can get a lot of information aggregated so that you can go into conversations around that warranty adherence conversation that occurs annually with a lot of backing and a lot of good information to argue your points with your vendor network. And then on safety, you can spot issues very early. You can spot these anomalous events so that you’re not having a full plant shutdown. You can have a de-rating. You can have maybe just one rack that is affected and take control of that situation rather than having a total site or huge percentage of the site go offline.

Jim: Yeah, that’s really interesting. When you had mentioned degradation, I wanted to dig into that just a little bit. How should owners think about long-term performance degradation and optimization when looking across the entire fleet?

Ryan: Yeah, there’s this, again, there’s this concept out there of the degradation being largely unknown. And again, what you’re finding is that it’s less of a problem than was expected. Now what is true, however, is that degradation does exist. And what you have to plan for there is a couple of different scenarios. I mean, one, oversizing at the beginning of a project.

Maybe you’re going to install more capacity than is truly contractually necessary so that you can always maintain the operating specs of the project throughout its lifetime. Two, maybe you’re looking at augmentation. It’s always been, some sites have done it, it’s always been an option, right, to add capacity somewhere in the life of a project. The biggest effect though, again, is a lot of projects are sold with a replacement of batteries that occurs.

Or it’s baked into the financials of a project. And usually that’s occurring once in terms of a 20-year project. When you think about doing that replacement of battery capacity really affects if the project’s going to reach its end of life. If you do it too early, you’re leaving capacity on the table. If you do it too late, you might be incurring penalties for not being able to meet the capacity and having to de-rate.

And furthermore, the timing is also important because of the cost curve of lithium-ion batteries, right? If you can delay it as long as possible, you’re probably going to get advantageous pricing just in terms of macroeconomics that we’ve seen over the past 10 or 15 years. So the short answer to the degradation question is using the data gives you a lot better picture in terms of your long-term strategy in how to operate as well as when to replace, augment, or otherwise change the capacity in your energy storage system.

Jim: That data is an important aspect looking at that. And I guess, so where does data analytics and artificial intelligence fit into helping teams make better operational and maintenance decisions?

Ryan: Yeah, there’s really 4 categories, I think, to be honest with you. So one is safety, right? So the concept is that really in an energy storage system, everything should be homogeneous. Everything should operate the same. If you have anomalous behavior, right, that maybe doesn’t reach the level of an alarm, but if you have some repeating problem, some repeating piece of data that is off from the rest of the system, that is worth flagging, and that is worth paying attention to. And that can very likely prevent a future safety issue in a lot of cases.

The second is, like I mentioned, being able to do partial operation. If you have a huge plant, right, and part of it is over temperature, maybe the HVAC was not, maybe there’s a problem with the HVAC, maybe there’s a problem with the liquid cooling, maybe there’s a problem with the battery system itself. Whatever the case, that is causing that over-temperature event. If you can go from a scenario of, holy cow, we better shut down everything to prevent something from getting further damage to, I see that it is just this corner of this container of batteries. That keeps a lot more capacity online and makes the resolution of that problem way faster.

Really getting to that root cause. That’s the third one, is root cause of performance or safety, right? I mean, being able to look and say, why is my system state of charge off by a certain amount of percent? And being able to use data and realize that is due to an imbalance issue or is due to some other specific attributable cause leads to much faster problem resolution.

And then really the 4th is alarm management, corrective action, right? So you, as an operator- not just of energy storage, but as an operator of anything on the electric grid- alarms are a daily part of life, right? And being able to connect that alarm with where it’s occurring and what the problem is through better data is really powerful, as well as being able to prioritize those alarms, right?

Being able to get a whole picture of something and see how things are interconnected rather than having all of these bells that are pointing to different areas of the system really helps to resolve problems faster and prevent problems from occurring in the first place.

Jim: Yeah, and that faster resolution translates into greater reliability and you can make greater contractual arrangements by being able to effectively use that data. That’s great. So what do you think will distinguish successful energy storage projects, say, over the next five years?

Ryan: The fact of the matter is that in the United States and all around the world, in anywhere that there is a competitive electricity market, the revenue window is shrinking, right? You have a lot more energy storage that is coming online. And so you have to be at your best in order to truly maintain revenue, not lose money on a project, get a good IRR. get a good ROI on the project. And a lot of that comes about through implementing really sophisticated controls. I mean, at the end of the day, inverters are well understood. Energy storage is now well understood.

One of the areas that is ripe for innovation and is ripe for energy storage developers and owners to take a look at is really refining their control strategy looking at how can I use this data again, how can I take responsibilities in-house and take a lot more ownership over my future destiny.

Now, the other thing that really plays into that future strategy is having a strategy, like having, going from I’m going to develop one plant at a time to I’m going to center on one, two, three different types of energy storage. I’m going to have a really qualified vendor network and not do customized engineering over time. I’m going to have repeatable processes and repeatable business contracts.

And a lot of that comes into negotiating your warranties, your guarantees, and your LTSAs. Having the technological control, but also having the business control over how your energy storage system is done is, I think, going to lead to a lot of kind of like a bifurcation in the energy storage space as to those that are just doing the status quo versus those that are really, really expert operators.

Jim: Yeah, it seems like it makes sense to move away from that… let’s custom build one-at-a-time, one-at-a-time and more. Build your network, standardize it, rinse and repeat kind of thing.

All right, let’s start winding things down here, Ryan. I guess as we head into the RE+ 2026 conference coming up from this time of recording, what conversations around energy storage are you most interested in having with customers and in the industry?

Ryan: Right. So, you know, Emerson has a lot of utility clients. If a utility wants to build energy storage, Absolutely, we welcome those conversations. In addition to those types of customers and utilities, if you’re an IPP that is doing standalone storage, come talk to us.

And then there’s those other use cases, right? There’s if you’re an operator of solar or wind and you’re thinking about implementing energy storage, we have the perfect solution for operating hybrid plants. If you’re operating a combustion turbine of any type, and you need to implement energy storage and grid-forming capabilities, come talk to us.

Those types of complex site-level SCADA and controls are definitely a specialty. The last thing that I would mention is if you’re an energy storage producer, whether it’s batteries or whether it is fully formed systems, or you’re somewhere along that journey and you’re looking to use and transition to a domestic supplier of controls, communications, and automation. That is absolutely a trend that we’re seeing and something that we’re interested in talking about.

Jim: Well, it sounds like there’s a lot of good reasons to be over there at the RE+ conference. Now I know for those that come upon after the conference is over or can’t make it and won’t be joining you and the team over there, where can they learn more about Emerson’s energy storage solutions or how best to connect with the team?

Ryan: The primary resource that I would point you to is https://www.emerson.com as a jumping-off point to a lot of different content.

Jim: That’s great. And if they come upon us in the blog post, there’ll be a link to your LinkedIn page where they can reach out to you. Ryan, it’s been enlightening. I’ve learned A lot. I hope our viewers and listeners have too. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Ryan: Perfect. Pleasure is mine, Jim.

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