Why we’re leading with BESS in 2026 — and the warranty mistake we keep seeing

We started in solar, and PV monitoring is still core to what we do. But over the last year we have deliberately led with battery storage — and it is worth saying why, because it explains the one mistake we see almost every BESS operator make.

Where the money and the risk moved

A modern utility BESS is an eight-figure asset whose value erodes every day it operates. Unlike a solar array, where degradation is slow and fairly benign, a battery is degraded by exactly the thing that earns it revenue — cycling. Every dispatch decision trades money today against capacity tomorrow. That tension makes storage the most analytically interesting asset on a renewables balance sheet, and the one where good data changes the financial outcome most.

The metrics that decide that outcome are not exotic. They are state of health, equivalent full cycles, depth of discharge, and the temperature and SoC windows the asset lives in. Track them and dispatch becomes a deliberate trade-off. Ignore them and you are guessing with someone else’s capital.

The mistake: the warranty as a filing cabinet

Here is the pattern we keep seeing. The warranty — the thing that protects the largest single risk on the asset — is treated as a document. It gets signed, filed, and forgotten until something goes wrong. By then, the data needed to make a claim was either never captured or never organised, and the operator is negotiating from weakness.

The warranty is not a document. It is a continuous data position. It hinges on two limits — capacity retention and energy throughput — plus a set of operating-window conditions whose violation voids cover. Whether you have a claim, or a liability, is knowable at any moment from your own SCADA and BMS data. We make that argument in full in why warranty disputes are won or lost in SCADA data, and we treat the warranty itself as something you measure, not store — the idea behind warranty as a data product.

What this means for an operator

You do not need to rip anything out. The data already exists; it is in your inverters, your BMS, your SCADA historian. The work is turning it into a live, honest view of where each asset stands against its warranty curve and its operating windows — so dispatch is deliberate and a claim, if it comes, is already evidenced.

That is why we lead with BESS. It is where the analytics earn their keep most directly, and where the gap between “we have a warranty” and “we can prove our position” is widest. The full reference lives in the BESS metrics library; the product that operationalises it is our BESS analytics.