Developing international standards is vitally important to the growth of grid-scale energy storage systems. These systems can make it possible to feed power to the grid so that production need not be scaled up and down repeatedly to adjust to changing demand levels. They also absorb the over-generation from wind and solar-power facilities and release that power when needed. The MESA (Modular Energy Storage Architecture) Standards Alliance is an industry group of dozens of equipment vendors and utilities working together to grow the energy storage industry by developing an open, non-proprietary set of specifications and standards. Our goal is to accelerate interoperability, scalability, safety, quality, availability, and affordability in energy storage components and systems.
This standardization effort has two main aspects. The first is a software control platform that allows all equipment from different vendors to talk the same “language,” so that when one piece of equipment sends a command or transmits data, it is received and interpreted correctly by the intended recipient.
The second aspect is ensuring that the hardware that makes up an energy storage system (ESS)—the batteries, power converters, metering system, and the energy management system (EMS) − can be intelligently “plugged into” each other and the electrical system.
In turn, the ESS must be intelligently plugged into the utility’s existing information and operations technology. Without established standards, components and systems will come with proprietary connectors, and the process of plugging them together becomes a laborious task repeated for each new project, which will add to project cost and lead time.
The MESA Standards Alliance is currently providing two specifications:
- MESA-ESS is designed to let electric utilities or grid operators scale deployment of energy storage and manage energy storage assets and fleets of multi-vendor assets to meet specific needs and use cases with minimal custom engineering
- MESA-Device Specifications and SunSpec Energy Storage Model address how energy storage components within an energy-storage system communicate with each other and its operational components.
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