Connected Energy’s Head of Data Science, Frazer Wagg, outlines our free feasibility study at Connected Energy to help our potential clients realise the benefits of battery energy storage.
From the moment an enquiry comes into our sales team at Connected Energy, we have specialists working to ensure that the prospective client has the potential to see ‘reward’ from our battery energy solution.
The reward can have many different meanings depending on a client’s needs and motivations, including carbon savings, reducing peak energy usage, and saving money on expensive grid usage. Or a mix of all the above, of course.
The first step, after an initial meeting with our sales team, regarding the prospective battery energy storage system is a feasibility study.
This is a crucial piece of information, for both Connected Energy and the client in question, as it provides tailored insights into how feasible (it says it on the tin) a battery energy storage system (BESS) would be at the client’s site.
Although you may think this is a sales hook of some kind, it is a credible piece of data analysis created by our data science team using as many real-life insights as possible from the client’s site to determine if the need, budget, energy usage, and potential carbon savings and cost savings (if applicable) are there.
Frazer said: “This isn’t an automated report, we use as many insights from grid usage as possible, or as many accurate estimates as possible to make a reasonable judgment on the viability of a BESS to ensure the time and financial investment is rewarding for a client.
“We do this through inputting data into our custom-built software, to provide a 100% tailored output in terms of carbon and/or cost savings, depending on the client’s requirements.”
We do this before offering a formal business proposal to a client to ensure that we can give a reasonable insight into the potential output of our system for their specific needs, as well as give more insights into the battery energy storage process and how it works.
Our feasibility study typically involves a site survey conducted by one of the Connected Energy team and:
Frazer added: “Regarding how far our data provides reasonable estimates, we can’t guarantee precise outcomes without the data to hand, but these do provide valuable and informative insights into projections of solar power output or other estimated data sets.
“Our data science team has worked hard to produce a continually expanding feasibility study model that relies on previous data, other clients, and industry insights, as well as any specific data that a customer can provide, to offer a tailored and realistic report on potential battery energy storage system performance that is custom to your needs.
This report is typically turned around within two weeks once the required data has been received and allows a client to understand in clear numbers what rewards they could expect from a BESS and is further supported by the following business proposal if a client would like to proceed.
“Your feasibility study is created with human data and insights, and not robotically generated, and it is the human input that ensures we can provide as much of a real-life perspective on your battery energy storage system’s potential as possible.”
"We do this as a free service – it’s part of our offering from Connected Energy designed to ensure that a battery energy storage system can answer your challenges – whether that’s around peak shaving, carbon savings, or costs."
"Yes, but we request that you undertake the feasibility study on the key sites that are going to be most rewarding in terms of your goals – we will discuss this with you during the initial sales process to ensure we give you the most insightful data."
“It’d be disingenuous for us to provide specific numbers without genuine data, but we can use best practice to offer estimates wherever possible, we’d need to know the PV size, battery capabilities involved, and offer some guidance based on these.
“Data gives confidence to the feasibility study, so without real data we can’t make any guarantees.”
“We take the recent national grid data for carbon content for electricity generation so that any captured energy is offsetting the use of average carbon content.
“If you have your own energy pricing and carbon forecasts, we can customise the average data we’d provide to specific your results as much as possible.”
“We can’t use this data if your site and/or energy usage has changed substantially.
“We ask for a year’s worth of half-hourly data, and this should be relevant to the usage, for instance, the Covid pandemic changed a lot of organisation’s energy usage and potentially falsified data, so we asked customers to use data pre-Covid for more accurate long-term use.
“If your data is no longer relevant due to site usage changes or building development, we’d recommend using estimates from sites with similar types/purposes, but this data would only be guidance.”
“We work with you to understand if you can, we have some initial modelling for fleet systems and some example sites of high use/publicly available EV charging, which we can scale from.
“We can’t always create bespoke modelling as it’s very dependent on changing variables, so we can’t guarantee accuracy.
“However, if it’s an EV site trying to solve a problem, we can estimate the likelihood of whether we can solve the issue, as a stress test.”
Do you have questions about the installation of our battery energy storage system and how our feasibility studies and site surveys are undertaken? We can arrange an informal discussion of your needs if you submit our contact form below.
