The Gap Between Data and Insights in Bess Operations: Findings From the 2026 Bess Pros Survey

This session will spotlight key findings from the 2026 BESS Pros Survey and translate them into practical takeaways for owners, operators, and teams responsible for performance, availability, safety, and revenue.

The survey explores how grid-scale BESS organisations are tackling day-to-day operational realities: which challenges are most critical, where time is being spent, how teams structure O&M, and how the industry is approaching tools, dashboards, and data access.

We will start by setting the context: what BESS teams say their top priorities and constraints are in 2026. Using survey insights, we’ll highlight the most common pain points across BESS challenges.

We’ll also look at “friction factors” that make operations harder—such as limited access to the right data, the lack of a single source of truth across multiple portals and dashboards, organisational disruption (turnover or ownership changes), internal cost constraints, and challenges in holding suppliers accountable to performance promises.

Next, we’ll dive into what operators report as the most time-consuming activities—alarm and notification triage, incident investigation and root-cause analysis, stakeholder reporting, maintenance planning and prioritisation, and building/maintaining internal dashboards and data pipelines. We’ll connect these realities with how organisations structure O&M (in-house, LTSAs, third-party contractors), and how they assess supplier performance across reliability, support, accountability, and data transparency.

Finally, we’ll focus on tools and data maturity: how many dashboards teams typically juggle, whether they own or have long-term access to BESS data, and how analytics are being handled. The session will close with a forward-looking discussion on what the market is prioritising next year—hiring/upskilling, augmentation planning, strengthening data infrastructure, tool integration, supplier selection, portfolio growth, and revenue development.