Compliance & Regulation

[Webinar Recap] Achieving Success in Energy Storage Development: Tips & Best Practices

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This image shows two hosts of a webinar outlining success tips for energy storage.

In this blog, we’ll recap our recent webinar, “Achieving Success in Energy Storage Development: Tips & Best Practices” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

Achieving Success in Energy Storage Development: Tips & Best Practices

Are you prioritizing the safety and success of your energy storage systems (ESS) development?

Teams developing ESS must prioritize product safety and effectively navigate the certification process. By learning best practices and gaining insights into Underwriter Laboratories (UL) standards, they can enhance safety and ensure compliance with industry regulations.

In this webinar, Christopher Flueckiger, Consulting Engineer at Key Renewables, and Steven Meadows, Principal Solutions Lead at Jama Software®, explore how a modern requirements management solution can help your development efforts, reduce risk, and provide a predefined framework tailored for energy storage systems.

You’ll gain a thorough understanding of these topics and more:

  • Proven best practices for energy storage system development
  • Key tips for achieving certification to UL standards
  • How Jama Connect®‘s pre-defined framework supports successful energy storage systems development and ensures compliance

Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and learn how a modern requirements management solution can streamline your energy storage development efforts.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Steven Meadows: Welcome to today’s webinar on achieving success, as well as energy storage development tips and best practices. So for today’s webinar, we’re going to dive into some essential topics that are going to be very important for successful and safe energy storage system development and successful certification. So our agenda really is going to cover a few areas, including key tips for achieving certification with UL standards and development best practices, Jama Software’s perspective on development challenges, and the effective use of Jama Connect for managing the development of energy storage systems, as well as a sneak peek into our new energy storage development framework.

Now, before we get started, I’d like to briefly introduce myself and my background. My name is Steven Meadows and I’m a principal solutions lead here at Jama Software. With a pretty robust background in requirements management, I bring around about 10 years of experience in implementing software and working with hardware and software teams across a broad spectrum of industries, helping important market game changers really succeed in their development efforts. Now, throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with many, many incredibly innovative and life-changing organizations, helping them navigate the intricate landscape of engineering. So Jama Software, my focus has been on empowering teams to achieve their project goals efficiently and with precision. Whether it’s harnessing the full capabilities of Jama connect the platform or strategizing for complex project scenarios and engineering scenarios. My passion really lies in delivering tangible results that drive innovation and enhance operational excellence. Today I’m excited to be joined by Chris Flueckiger who will be talking about energy storage development best practices and certification tips. He’s a bit of a guru in the space. Would you like to introduce yourself, Chris?

Christopher Flueckiger: Sure. Thank you. It’s nice to meet everybody. I’ve spent about the first half of my career working with the design phase of electrical equipment and then the past almost 30 years in the certification of renewable energy systems including battery energy storage systems. So I’ve been working with large companies. I work with all the certifiers currently and represent companies as they look towards certification, all the way from the concept and design of a product through the final certification in marketing and installation. So I look forward to talking with everybody.

RELATED: Energy Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy

Flueckiger: This is going to be interesting. In a half hour, we’re going to try to cover the complexity of certification, but to do so in a way that’ll provide efficient moving from the development of a product to the marketplace. And this is an image of that process when we talk about certification. It starts with a list of documentation, knowledge, and an understanding of what applies to your product. And to go back just one step, it’s understanding what your standards and codes are that are driving that certification of your device. You’ll see the blue text here that represents work that you can do ahead of time to ease the process of certification when you actually present your product to the certifier. And this blue information here is a collection of documentation and evidence, if you will, that your product indeed complies with whatever standards might apply.

When we’re talking about energy storage systems, we’re looking primarily at UL9540 and UL9540A. And the code that drives that is going to be the NFPA 855. And so all these little blue boxes are critical as we prepare for our submission for certification. I will say that not having this information as you enter into certification results in significant time delays, and resource costs as far as samples needed, retesting, redesign, etc. And so what we’re going to do is go through some of these critical points here and discuss how we can make it easier, what we can do to prepare better so that we can be as efficient as possible. Just an example of how efficiency can help you, a typical certification of an energy storage system is going to take about … Well, it could be anywhere from 14 to 16 weeks. We’ve had some certifications that have taken more than a year to complete when they haven’t been prepared properly or they’ve had to be redesigned or test results have come back that have shown a lack of compliance with the UL9540 standard. So it’s critical that we move forward in a smart, organized, and efficient manner.

Talking about the beginning of this whole process is a knowledge of all of your codes and standards that apply to your energy storage system. It’s more than just a marketing scheme. It’s a legal requirement that devices are certified or proven safe to the authorities having jurisdictions or AHJs that approve those installations in one of the many, many, approximately 3000 different jurisdictions across the United States. Those codes are called out by the building codes. From there it calls out specific codes for electrical and fire safety. And those codes are adopted by local jurisdictions giving them some teeth. They’re legislated into effect, which gives them the legal basis as a requirement in order to install an energy storage system within a particular jurisdiction. And that legal basis is important. When we talk about certification, often companies see it as a necessary step, maybe even an obstacle that they have to achieve just to get their product to market, but it has more meaning than that.

It basically establishes a bar of entry for electrical devices that are suitable and acceptable for installation in specific jurisdictions. Now in the United States, we fortunately have the NFPA 70 or National Electrical Code that drives those requirements for safe electrical equipment, and that follows through along with the fire codes. So there is a legal basis for doing this. And yes, it can be time-consuming and it can be costly to go for certification, but it’s a necessary step in order to demonstrate that our products meet the industry standards for a level of safety. We do that basically as a consensus agreement within the industry on the requirements that are established both in the codes and in the standards. So it’s not simply a checkoff, it is an integral part of the safety of our electrical systems in the United States.

RELATED: Power Efficiency and Innovation Across Your Development Process with Jama Connect® for Energy Storage Systems

Meadows: Have you worked with teams in the past, maybe missed the upfront research around codes and standard requirements, and any examples of some of the impacts of that?

Flueckiger: Oh, absolutely. And oftentimes, as I say, they’re looked at as a necessary evil and bypassed, if you will, during the design phases. And then they come back later with those requirements and try to implement them at the last minute. And that often requires redesign of electrical circuits, repackaging of the product, et cetera. So it can be rather detrimental and costly to wait until the end. Good question.

So when we look at typical requirements that are included in the standards and the codes, we’ll be referencing UL9540 quite often here. They’re broken down into three major categories. We have your general construction requirements, and this is your design, right? These are the components that you’re putting together into a package that provides whatever functionality you are advertising or you’re stating that your energy storage system will provide. For example, you may have an input voltage of 480 volts. You might have an output voltage of 120 volts, whatever the case might be. You may have a certain amount of energy storage and, a number of batteries in your system that operates in a certain way to provide either backup power or to even maybe clean up a microgrid someplace in an industry, for example. But all of those general requirements for ratings rely on construction. Everything from the wire nuts holding two wires together or the connectors, all the way to the batteries and through the whole system with cooling systems potentially, and other systems that make up a part of the whole system that you’re looking to market.

And so those general construction requirements are basically material type requirements, component requirements, and mechanical requirements, and all of them are specified or delineated in UL9540. From the electrical side, we have a little bit more to deal with as well. For example, there are different circuits in battery energy storage systems. We may have an AC connection, we may have a DC set of batteries, we may have an inverter that is making that DC energy usable to the outside world, etc. All of those different circuits within the system have to be isolated from each other so that we don’t have somebody touching an antenna on a communications device and getting 480 volts at that antenna. We want to make sure they’re safe and that they’re separated. And one of the common things that’s missed along the way is that isolation. Spacing is a word that’s commonly used in electrical to define how we develop that isolation using air, for example, as an insulator.

We also might use materials that we talked about in the general construction requirements that have certain dielectric strengths to them so that we don’t have arc over within electrical circuits going from a high voltage, for example, to low voltage. So that’s an important part that has a huge impact on whether or not design is adequate, the design of your circuit boards, your interconnection of devices, etc. Whether or not they’re adequate to meet the requirements of the standards.

And then that follows by those individual components that we’re interconnecting. Whether it’s the batteries, the interconnection to a battery management system or a charging system to an inverter, to a fan, to a cooling system, or an HVAC system depending on the size of your system. But those components that make up the structure have to be relied upon in order to function safely. Not only to function safely but to produce the desired output that’s required of your energy storage system, whether it’s AC or DC, whether your input is AC or DC. All those components work together and are interconnected to produce the output and the functionality of your system.

To watch the entire webinar, visit:
Achieving Success in Energy Storage Development: Tips & Best Practices​

 

Steven Meadows
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