Think TWAICE: How VERBUND, Austria's leading energy company, uses Digital Commissioning to reduce the risk associated with the initial operation of its battery storage facilities.

TWAICE, the most important provider of battery analysis software, today announced that VERBUND, Austria's leading energy company and one of Europe's largest generators of electricity from hydropower, has successfully used "Digital Commissioning" for the start-up of its energy storage systems. The new product in the TWAICE software suite was developed in response to the complex challenges that arise during the initial operation of energy storage systems. The TWAICE software suite enables VERBUND to reduce the risk that exists during the start-up of new energy storage systems and to optimise their operating efficiency.

The goal of VERBUND to increase its battery storage capacity to a total of 1 gigawatt by 2030 led to the collaboration with TWAICE. Because such an increase leads to more complex and more cost-intensive initial operation processes, an increased risk of missed deadlines and the challenge of maintaining standardised, comparable data across different systems.

Martin Wagner, managing director of VERBUND Energy4Business, is happy about the cooperation: "TWAICE Digital Commissioning helps us to overcome the challenges posed by an increasingly diverse system integrator landscape and ever larger battery energy storage systems (BESS). It is a must for determining the output at the start of operation and for identifying faults before operations commence."

The TWAICE software, which only requires an online connection for the storage system, supplies a detailed audit of the new VERBUND energy storage system at the beginning of the lifecycle (BoL). Important key performance indicators (KPIs), including State of Health (SoH), Direct Current Resistance (DCR), Round Trip Efficiency (RTE), capacity and various dispersions are determined and simplify the detection of anomalies.

The main BoL data serve as the basis for future plant administration and enable the timely submission of warranty claims or claims for defects. The report also enables the independent verification of the data provided by the manufacturers and makes it easier to compare the different energy storage systems.

The results are important for proper initial operation because the standardised process of TWAICE highlights anomalies in the VERBUND energy storage systems and helps to identify weak cells, temperatures spikes and faults in the cooling system that might possibly be overlooked during conventional initial operation. This is made possible by the enormous volume of data that TWAICE analyses, which would not be achievable with the other means of analysis available on site.

"We are thrilled with the results of our collaboration with VERBUND," says Dr Stephan Rohr, co-founder and managing director of TWAICE. "Our Digital Commissioning tool has not only confirmed its ability to reduce the risks associated with the use of energy storage systems, but also supplies important findings which will be decisively important for the further expansion of VERBUND."

With its ability to check the BESS output with minimal effort, to give a standardised and comparable overview of the BESS output in the BoL and to identify potential anomalies, the Digital Commissioning tool from TWAICE is an invaluable resource for plant owners for the expansion of their BESS installation.