KEYNOTE Industry Reality: From Build to Operate
The BESS market has spent a decade building assets, now it must run them for 15+ years. What does that shift really mean for the industry?
- The developer-operator gap: why the skills, incentives, and mindsets that built the industry are not the ones that will sustain it.
- What does it mean to manage a battery for 15 years, and what does the industry still fundamentally not know?
- Data centers and hyperscalers as the next chapter of BESS demand, and how rapid deployment at scale is reshaping the market.
- FEOC compliance and domestic supply chain pressure: how regulatory exposure is forcing procurement decisions that weren't in the original business case?
What Asset Managers Wish Developers Had Addressed Earlier
How decisions made at the development stage can create operational uncertainties years later.
- Which procurement choices (e.g. warranties, data access rights, LTSA structures, augmentation obligations) are hardest to renegotiate post-COD?
- Finance modelers and legal teams routinely sign off on technical assumptions they don't fully understand, where does that asymmetry show up in the P&L?
- What do investors still misunderstand about the day-to-day cost of running a battery asset, and who is responsible for closing that gap?
- When an asset changes hands, what does a proper technical due diligence look like, and what do buyers routinely miss on state of degradation, maintenance records, and warranty transfers?
When the Lawyers Sign What the Engineers Wouldn't
Why the technical input that reaches legal, procurement and finance modelers is often the wrong input, and what it costs when operational reality doesn't feed back into how contracts are written.
- OEM sales teams are technically fluent in a way buyer-side legal teams aren't, where does that asymmetry show up in the final contract, and how do you close the gap?
- Finance modelers rely on technical assumptions around degradation curves, round-trip efficiency, and augmentation costs, who is validating those assumptions, and what happens when nobody is?
- The engineers who specified the system at procurement are rarely the ones running it a decade later, how do you write contracts that account for operational realities that haven't happened yet?
- At what point in a deal process does technical input get overruled because it's slowing things down, and what has that cost the industry?
Stream 1: Technical Asset Management
What the Data Actually Tells You
Merging the SOC accuracy and stranded capacity conversation: how inaccurate battery data flows from monitoring through to trading performance.
- SOC can be off by up to 15%, where does that inaccuracy originate, and who is responsible for fixing it?
- What does 'useful' imbalance data look like from an asset manager's perspective versus an OEM's?
- How much capacity is routinely left stranded by OEM-mandated buffers, and how is that number changing as analytics improve?
- What level of SOC precision and failure prediction would meaningfully change how trading desks size their positions?
- How do degradation and cell imbalance interact over the asset lifecycle and when does a technical monitoring problem become a revenue problem?
- Can third-party analytics close the gap, or does unlocking stranded capacity ultimately require working directly with the OEM?
- Should SOC accuracy be a contractual obligation, and if so, who holds the risk?
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
Talking to Non-Technical Stakeholders Without Losing Them
How to communicate performance, risk, and constraints to investors, lenders, and boards.
- What information do investors and lenders need from asset managers, and what are operators wasting time reporting that nobody reads?
- How do you explain a degradation curve, a round-trip efficiency shortfall, or a warranty dispute to a finance team in a way that leads to a decision?
- What does a performance report look like when it is designed for a non-technical board, and what gets lost in translation?
- How to build internal credibility to earn a genuine seat at the table in commercial and investment decisions?
Talking to Non-Technical Stakeholders Without Losing Them
How to communicate performance, risk, and constraints to investors, lenders, and boards.
- What information do investors and lenders need from asnset managers, and what are operators wasting time reporting that nobody reads?
- How do you explain a degradation curve, a round-trip efficiency shortfall, or a warranty dispute to a finance team in a way that leads to a decision?
- What does a performance report look like when it is designed for a non-technical board, and what gets lost in translation?
- How to build internal credibility to earn a genuine seat at the table in commercial and investment decisions?
Stream 2: Commercial Asset Management
Who Carries the Risk When the OEM Underperforms or Goes Bankrupt?
Warranty structures, LTSA obligations, and what asset owners are failing to negotiate before it is too late.
- What is the practical difference between a warranty claim and a plant underperformance claim, and why does that distinction cost asset owners millions?
- How should asset owners structure back-to-back warranties between offtakers, themselves, and OEMs- and what happens when a counterparty fails?
- Round-trip efficiency has no agreed definition, so what should the contractual standard be, and who should bear the measurement risk?
- How big is the gap between lab-tested and field-tested performance, who absorbs the cost when it shows up?
- Regarding data access rights in LTSAs, what clauses are asset owners routinely failing to negotiate?
- When a vendor goes bankrupt mid-contract, what options does an asset owner have, and what should they have secured at procurement?
Revenue Structures for Bess - Tolling, Capacity, Arbitrage, and Ancillary Services
How operators are structuring revenue across market types, and where the stack is under pressure.
- How do tolling and capacity agreements with utilities differ from private market arrangements, and what are the trade-offs?
- At what point does merchant exposure become unacceptable, and how do operators hedge without giving up the upside?
- How is the revenue picture changing as more BESS capacity comes online and margins compress?
- What role can ancillary services play as a stable floor, and which markets make this easiest to access?
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
Workshop Zone
Sponsored Workshop 1: Incident Response Tabletop - When Your Battery Doesn’t Behave
A facilitated scenario exercise on thermal events, OEM response, and multi-stakeholder communication.
- How do you manage communication with offtakers, lenders, and regulators simultaneously without creating legal exposure?
- What are the triggers for invoking a warranty versus managing the issue internally?
- Where do communication chains break down, and what contractual provisions help?
- Output: a draft incident response checklist participants can adapt for their own assets.
Stream 1: Technical Asset Management
Delegate-Chosen Roundtables
Small-group discussions on topics voted during online registration.
Candidates include: end-of-life planning (decommissioning, reuse, recycling); asset acquisition and change-of-hands due diligence; third-party versus in-house operations; workforce development and attracting talent from adjacent industries; and practical AI applications in day-to-day operations. Votes cast at registration shape which topics run.
Stream 2: Commercial Asset Management
Trading Energy: The Operator’s View on Merchant Risk and Asset Health
How purpose-built operators balance battery health against trading revenue, and where the model breaks down.
- How do you decide when to prioritize battery health versus maximizing short-term trading revenue, and who in the organization makes that call?
- What does it mean to absorb merchant risk as an operator, and how is that risk managed on a day-to-day basis?
- What do operators rely on to catch performance degradation before it becomes a revenue event, and what do they routinely miss?
- How do you communicate real-time asset health constraints to trading desks without killing their upside or destroying the commercial relationship?
- Forward curves, analyst consistency, and financing assumptions versus operational reality.
- Why are some revenue forecasts wrong, and what that costs the industry.
Workshop Zone
Cybersecurity: Are Your Battery Assets the Next Target?
As the battery energy storage industry integrates more digital technologies, the risk of cyber threats targeting battery assets and grid infrastructure has become a critical concern.
- Identifying and mitigating cybersecurity risks in battery asset management.
- Best practices for securing data, communication networks, and control systems.
- The role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in detecting and preventing cyber threats.
- Navigating compliance with cybersecurity regulations and standards in the energy sector.
Stream 2: Commercial Asset Management
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
Market-by-Market: ERCOT, CAISO, MISO, and PJM
Four markets, four revenue stacks, four sets of roundtables. Subject matter experts per region on what drives performance in each.
- Table A [ERCOT]: What drives performance in the most liquid and volatile BESS market, and what do operators consistently get wrong about the risks.
- Table B [CAISO]: How the duck curve and resource adequacy obligations are reshaping the commercial case for storage, and whether California's market is built to match its ambitions.
- Table C [MISO]: Significant untapped potential, real structural barriers. What's holding back BESS deployment, and where is the opportunity right now.
- Table D [PJM]: Capacity market dysfunction, interconnection backlogs, layered complexity. How the region creates both opportunity and operational headache in equal measure.
KEYNOTE FEOC, Domestic Supply Chains, and the Procurement Decisions You Can't Undo
Foreign Entity of Concern compliance is no longer a checkbox, it is reshaping procurement strategy, financing structures, and OEM relationships across the industry.
- What does FEOC compliance require of asset owners and developers, and how far ahead of enforcement is the industry preparing?
- How is regulatory pressure on domestic content reshaping OEM selection, supply chain design, and project economics?
- Which procurement decisions made in 2022 and 2023 are now creating FEOC exposure, and what options do asset owners have?
- How are lenders and tax equity investors treating FEOC risk in project finance, and what disclosures are now standard?
- What does a FEOC compliant domestic supply chain look like at scale, and how far away is the industry from getting there?
The Software Stack - EMS, Scada, Analytics, and Who Does What
How asset owners are building their data and control infrastructure, and where the gaps are.
- What does a mature software stack look like for a fleet operator?
- EMS, SCADA, and analytics tools often come from different vendors, how should they communicate with each other?
- Vendor versus in-house- where is the right line, and how do you avoid being locked in either direction?
- What are the practical applications of AI and LLMs in asset management today - and what is still hype?
- How can BESS operators borrow from wind and solar asset managers who are further ahead on software maturity?
Safety, Regulation, and the Push for Federal Standardisation
The regulatory patchwork facing BESS operators and the industry's campaign for a national baseline that doesn't punish emerging markets.
- How does a single thermal incident ripple into contract amendments, augmentation requirements, and performance obligations across a fleet?
- Should California's codes become the de facto national standard, or would applying them universally set the bar too high for markets that are just getting started?
- What is the industry's realistic path to federal standardisation, and what are the political and commercial blockers?
- What should asset owners be doing now to future-proof against codes that don't exist yet?
- How are insurance markets responding to evolving safety standards, and what does that mean for project economics?
Morning Coffee Break
Stream 1: Technical Asset Management
KPIs, Benchmarking, and a Call for Industry Standards
A proposal for the metrics the industry should agree on before the lack of standardisation becomes a systemic problem.
- You can't improve what you can't measure: what are the three to five KPIs the industry should standardize first?
- Availability, round-trip efficiency, and state-of-health all mean different things to different stakeholders- how do we fix that?
- What would a benchmarking industry look like, and who would need to be in the room to make it work?
- How do large portfolio owners and utilities approach KPI tracking differently from single-asset operators, and what can the market learn from them?
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
OEM Relationships - Expectations, Reality, and How to Contract Better
Bridging the gap between what OEMs promise and what asset owners experience on the ground.
- What do asset owners forget to consider when setting expectations with OEMs at procurement, and what should they be asking for instead?
- Single integrated OEM versus best-of-breed: in which scenarios does hardware-software-service integration benefit the operator?
- How are fleet operators making the vendor-versus-in-house decision on operations and software ownership?
Stream 2: Commercial Asset Management
Cycling, Degradation, and the 20-Year Asset: What the Data Actually Shows Separating OEM promises from field reality.
- How big is the gap between lab-tested and field-tested performance, and why are OEM degradation curves consistently optimistic?
- Augmentation strategy: when is it more cost-effective to augment, and when have you simply over-cycled the asset?
- How do cycling decisions made in year one affect capacity, warranty, and revenue in years ten through twenty?
- What does a realistic 20-year performance model look like, and which assumptions are most frequently wrong at financial close?
- Second-life use cases, field service after warranty expiry, and the emerging end-of-life economy: what should asset owners be planning for now?
The Long View: Resource Adequacy, LDES, and Where Revenue Comes From in 2030
Howthe market evolves as supply grows, demand shifts, and new storage technologies emerge.
- Are utilities willing to offer the resource adequacy terms that make long-duration projects bankable, and what would shift their position?
- Where does long-duration energy storage fit in the stack as lithium-ion dominates the near term?
- Data centers as integrated utilities and captive BESS customers: how should developers be thinking about this segment, and what does rapid deployment at scale do to the broader market?
- Will standalone BESS companies continue to exist, or will the future be dominated by solar-plus-storage developers and vertically integrated utilities?
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
Workshop Zone
Workshop 4: Workforce Development - Building the Team That Runs Your Batteries
How to hire, train, and retain the operational talent the industry needs.
- Where is BESS operational talent coming from (gas plants, real estate, solar), and what does conversion require?
- What should a 'battery curriculum’ cover, and is there appetite for an industry-wide training standard?
- How do you build a team that can both deliver bad news to stakeholders and solve complex technical problems under pressure?
Stream 1: Technical Asset Management
Decommissioning, Second Life, and the End-of-Life Economy
What should asset owners be planning for, and who is building the infrastructure to handle it?
- What does a realistic decommissioning plan look like for a utility-scale BESS asset?
- Which battery chemistries and degradation profiles make second-life viable, and which make it a liability?
- What recycling infrastructure exists today, what is coming, and how should asset owners be factoring end-of-life obligations into project economics now?
- How are regulators and insurers beginning to treat battery end-of-life risk, and what disclosure standards are emerging?
Stream 2: Commercial Asset Management
Interconnection, Grid Access, and the Bottlenecks That Won't Go Away
How interconnection timelines, costs, and reform efforts are reshaping BESS economics
- Interconnection queues now stretch to five years in some markets, how are developers and operators adapting their project pipelines?
- How does rising load growth driven by data centres and electrification affect the economics and queue position of new BESS projects?
- How should the cost of connecting new large loads be allocated and is the current framework fair to existing asset owners?
- What would meaningful interconnection reform look like, and is the political will there to deliver it before the queue problem becomes a crisis?
Stream 1: Technical Asset Management
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
Stream 2: Commercial Asset Management
Reserved Sponsorship Presentation
Delegate-Chosen Roundtables
Small-group discussions on topics voted during online registration.
Candidates include: end-of-life planning (decommissioning, reuse, recycling); asset acquisition and change-of-hands due diligence; third-party versus in-house operations; workforce development and attracting talent from adjacent industries; and practical AI applications in day-to-day operations. Votes cast at registration shape which topics run.

