Volytica Diagnostics, a leading battery diagnostics company, is calling on the energy storage industry to shift its focus from adding more fire protection hardware to leveraging operational battery data for early fault detection, aiming to prevent safety incidents before they escalate. The appeal comes in the wake of the recent fire at a 1.5 MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in Bautzen, Germany, where the cause is still under investigation.

Claudius Jehle, co-founder and managing director of Volytica Diagnostics, emphasized that the industry’s typical response to battery fires—such as demanding more temperature sensors, gas detection, smoke monitoring and fire suppression systems—only addresses issues after a fault has already developed. While these reactive technologies help contain incidents and protect people and infrastructure, they fail to prevent the initial occurrence of hazards.

Instead, Jehle highlighted that battery management systems (BMS) already collect thousands of voltage, current and temperature measurements that can be analyzed to identify developing faults days or even weeks before conventional alarms are triggered. Advanced diagnostic software can detect subtle changes in cell voltages, internal resistance, balancing times and thermal behavior without requiring additional sensors, by comparing relationships between parameters, individual cells and historical operating patterns to spot abnormal behavior.

A compelling example is an 80 MWh battery storage project in North America, where a module exhibited increasingly abnormal thermal behavior over several weeks without triggering alarms from either the BMS or supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Subsequent analysis confirmed the developing fault was detectable several days before it became critical, underscoring the value of proactive data analysis.