Strategic planning for the battery energy storage system (BESS) safety and reliability over the BESS life cycle

Over the recent years, there has been growing interest in the development of large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS). For BESS and their critical components, it is important to be planned, designed, manufactured, installed, operated/maintained to ensure the long-term safety and reliability. Due consideration early in the life cycle could particularly minimize the future operational, maintenance and renewal efforts. However, all these life cycle stages are often managed separately. Accordingly, the relevant international standards and industry guidelines are still applied without the whole life cycle consideration. In this paper, a relevant conceptual model is then developed at the strategic level to apply all these standards/guidelines in unison. When BESS safety and reliability have been maximized, this, in turn, improves the performance of the whole electric power transmission system. Proper strategic planning requires arguably consideration of a number of standards on dependability, which have been published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). During the operational life, the IEC standards will also play their role along with European Standards (EN) on maintenance engineering and management published by Comité Européen De Normalisation (CEN) and further assist with the AMS implementation. In addition, ISO 55001 based asset management system (AMS) should also be developed for the whole electric power transmission system to manage its performance and associated risks, but also to minimize respective financial costs. AMS will assist, amongst other things, with cascading key performance indicators (KPIs) down to tactical and operational levels and on this basis, asset planning at all these levels while maintaining the proper ’line-of-sight’. All these standards have been identified by the authors in their careful and systematic review process and discussed contextually in this paper.