Our article featured on Energy Storage News, The State of BESS Analytics: Three Views from The Smarter E 2026, put analytics at the center of how modern storage is run. This piece follows the battery past the dashboard, into the years of hands-on work that decide whether it actually lasts. At The Smarter E 2026, Sander Jacobs, Chief Commercial Officer at Renewance, sat down with Jacob Yang, Marketing Consultant at PowerUp, to walk through what it takes to manage a battery from commissioning to end of life, and where analytics fits into the work.
One Provider, Every Stage
Renewance was founded in 2015 by three former GE Energy Storage leaders, with a mission to help the energy and mobility sectors transition to renewables. Batteries are the enabler, and the company built its business around managing battery assets across their entire lifecycle, for both stationary storage and electric vehicle fleets.
“From cradle to grave, Renewance provides a wide suite of services to help owners and operators cost-effectively manage their assets’ performance, and longevity.” – Sander Jacobs, Chief Commercial Officer, Renewance.
That suite covers the full lifecycle of the asset. When an OEM or integrator brings a product to market, Renewance handles installation and commissioning. It manages warranty programs and investigates claims, and it repairs what needs repairing, either in the field or at its own repair center near Chicago. Across the fifteen to twenty years a system operates, it provides the operations and maintenance that keep performance up. And when a system reaches the end of its life, it handles system decommissioning, component repurposing or recycling, and site restoration.
An Industry That Grew Up
The scale of the work has changed fast. A decade or two ago, Sander noted, a large grid project was a fraction of today’s size, and the range of skills a service provider needs has grown just as quickly.
What owners want out of that scale has not changed: a system that performs, that lasts as long as the financial model assumed, and that stays cost-effective to run. Those three goals are the lens a good service provider brings to every visit.
Cost Lives in the Visit
Cost-effectiveness comes down to how much a technician can accomplish in a single trip. A provider that can service the batteries, the power conversion system (PCS), and the balance of plant in one visit is far more economical than one that sends a separate crew for each service activity. The broader the skill set, the fewer the truck rolls.
The same logic drives the case for expert technicians and disciplined preventative maintenance. Someone who can troubleshoot quickly minimizes downtime when something goes wrong, and regular inspections catch small defects before they become unplanned outages. None of it is glamorous, but it is where an operator’s running costs are won or lost.
Where Battery Analytics Earns Its Keep
From a service provider’s vantage point, the value of advanced analytics is timing. Basic monitoring already exists: an operator can watch batteries individually or look at the energy management system (EMS) and, if someone is looking closely, notice that racks are drifting out of balance. What that view cannot do on its own is flag the drift early, put a number on what it is costing, and point to where it is coming from. That is the work of an advanced analytics platform, and Sander’s point was that having the impact reported and quantified early, in time to fold the correction into an outage already on the calendar, is what changes the economics. Rebalance in that window, and the stranded energy comes back without an emergency dispatch, its cost, or its downtime.
Timing protects more than a single visit’s budget. An imbalanced system wears some components harder than others, so leaving it uncorrected shortens the life of the whole asset, not just the weakest part. Catching it early is part of holding the longevity the financial model assumed.
His larger point was about where the analytics lives. A battery analytics platform on its own still leaves someone to turn alerts into work orders. Wired into the asset-management platform a service provider already runs, RenewanceConnect in Renewance’s case, the same alert opens a ticket, triggers a workflow, and lands in a logged record of service and health history. And not every finding is the provider’s to act on. Work inside the agreed scope simply gets done, while anything beyond it needs the owner’s sign-off, so the provider shares the findings and recommendations and the owner-operator decides.
The Second-Life Question
Not every battery that comes off a site is finished. A system can fall out of its economic case while the hardware is still sound, which makes it a candidate to redeploy somewhere else, at a different duration. The catch, Sander said, is valuation. A spot check can tell you a used system’s residual capacity and power, but it cannot tell you how hard the system was run to get there, and a rough operating history can hide a latent safety problem. A full, logged operating history is what closes that gap. An asset that arrives with years of recorded behavior tells a far better story in the used market than a module handed over with nothing but a one-time health check.
Who Keeps It Running
A battery only delivers on a fifteen or twenty-year promise if someone tends it across those years. Analytics point to what needs attention and when, and a capable provider turns that signal into a scheduled fix, a recovered megawatt-hour, or a sound read on what a used system is still worth. That is the layer Renewance occupies, from the first commissioning check to the asset’s next life.
Watch the full conversation with Sander Jacobs, Chief Commercial Officer at Renewance, and Jacob Yang, Marketing Consultant at PowerUp.
