As global energy demand surges, battery energy storage system (BESS) projects exceeding 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) in capacity are becoming increasingly common. Multi-GWh-scale systems are critical for integrating renewable energy, maintaining grid stability, and achieving climate goals. However, with massive scale comes operational complexity. In August 2024, Wärtsilä Energy Storage released the latest generation of its GEMS Digital Energy Platform, designed to control, monitor, and optimise high-capacity assets with high precision and reliability.
GEMS is sophisticated software that monitors, controls, and optimises energy assets at both site and portfolio levels. The latest generation of GEMS enables smart control of multi-GWh-scale sites worldwide, empowering utilities, developers, and independent power producers to maximise reliability and efficiency. At its inception over 15 years ago, GEMS was designed to manage 1-5 MW sites. Today, with surging renewable energy demand, it now supports a thousand times that capacity for a single site. This evolution has transformed operator needs, requiring an intuitive, efficient way to monitor and control high-capacity energy assets within microseconds to appropriately respond to grid demands and perform advanced applications.
Imagine every light on your car's dashboard illuminating at once—how would you quickly identify and address the root cause? Now imagine trying to monitor and control millions of batteries and highly consequential equipment. GEMS simplifies this complexity. It allows customers to tap into the full potential of their resources, something that’s crucial for grid-scale clean energy adoption and achieving a 100% renewable energy future.
Reducing latency is essential for BESS owners looking to participate in increasingly sophisticated grid services and applications. As spinning turbines are replaced by renewables, batteries are being called upon to respond to frequency events and provide natural inertia to the grid. These capabilities are particularly vital in regions like California and Australia, where rapid frequency response is crucial to maintaining grid stability. GEMS enables the control of BESS facilities with exceptional speed – responding within microseconds – to help customers meet stringent and complex grid code and power purchase agreements (PPAs) requirements.
Beyond speed, GEMS provides asset visibility down to the individual battery cell level, which is a unique offering in energy management software. Visibility into parameters such as voltage, temperature, and current enables early detection of abnormal cell conditions that need to be proactively addressed. GEMS not only measures this data, but also analyses it to optimise performance across energy assets and portfolios.
Additional advancements in the GEMS platform in 2024 included more comprehensive and actionable visualisations for the management of large sites and ongoing module-level data access for users. The latest updates also introduce features for partitioning sites to assign specific revenue-generating applications and include controls for cell balancing and state-of-charge (SoC) calibration. New granular alarm management features and the functionality of restricting remote site control enhance the safety and security of energy storage systems. These innovations address the need for faster response times, offer extensive granular-level data, and empower BESS owners to adapt seamlessly to evolving grid demands.
Wärtsilä Energy Storage’s GEMS Digital Energy Platform has supported battery deployments worldwide for the past 15 years. This mature software platform is already operational across over 130 projects globally, spanning diverse markets such as AEMO in Australia, CAISO, ERCOT, MISO, and PJM in the United States, as well as in Great Britain, Taiwan, and Chile. Within each site that GEMS operates, our customers entrust GEMS to control thousands of devices and, at times, over a million batteries to enable them to fulfill power purchase agreements, improve grid reliability and resiliency, manage a hybrid island grid to decrease the cost of energy and boost renewable energy consumption, and other advanced energy applications that provide clean energy to the grid and grow revenue.
