In this blog, we summarise the key insights from the latest episode of the Climate Confident Podcast, where Ashutosh Vats, Business Development Manager - BESS, joins host Tom Raftery to discuss why reliable battery data is becoming one of the most valuable assets in utility-scale energy storage.
The hidden challenge behind battery performance
Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are playing an increasingly important role in enabling the energy transition. As deployment accelerates and batteries participate in more energy markets, operators are under growing pressure to maximise both performance and revenue.
Yet one critical challenge often goes unnoticed: understanding what a battery can actually deliver.
If available capacity or state of charge is miscalculated, the consequences extend far beyond operations. Poor battery intelligence can result in imbalance penalties, missed revenues, accelerated degradation and warranty disputes, ultimately affecting the financial performance of the entire project. Imbalance penalties in particular are one of the most immediate and underestimated revenue drains and in many cases, they are entirely avoidable. We explored this topic in detail in our recent blog: How to detect BESS imbalance before it drains your revenue.
Three different perspectives for the same Battery Energy Storage System
One of the key themes explored in the podcast is that a battery is viewed very differently depending on who is looking at it:
- The asset owner focuses on long-term returns and asks whether the project is delivering against the business plan
- The asset manager monitors performance, degradation and battery health
- Meanwhile, the energy trader needs to know, in real time, how much capacity can be safely committed to the market
Without a single, trusted view of the battery's actual capabilities, these stakeholders risk making decisions based on different assumptions. The result can be summarised as lost value, unnecessary risk and reduced confidence in the asset.
This is precisely the problem that SynaptiQ, 3E's hardware-agnostic asset performance management platform, is built to solve giving owners, managers and traders a shared, independent source of truth on what the battery can genuinely deliver.
Listen to the full podcast
In this episode of the Climate Confident Podcast, Ashutosh Vats explains why independent battery intelligence is becoming essential for utility-scale BESS, covering topics such as battery capacity validation, revenue optimisation, degradation, warranty compliance, digital twins and the future of energy storage.
As batteries become increasingly central to the power system, one thing is clear: it's not enough to know what the Battery Management System reports, you need to know what the battery can genuinely deliver.
Listen to the full episode to discover why better battery intelligence leads to better operational decisions, stronger financial performance and more reliable battery assets.
