I work closely with renewables, and specifically with BESS — but mostly from the power system side, within protection & control. Meaning I tend to look at a battery as a grid element: how it behaves during faults, what the settings should be, how it fits the grid code. What actually happens inside the container was always something I wanted to unpack layer by layer.
I recently took Sergey S.’s course, and it does exactly that — starting from the cell and working up: — what modern battery cells are actually made of, and why the chemistry drives so much of what happens further up the chain — how modules and containers are put together: components, structure, thermal management, all the things that turn a pile of cells into a product — what sits on the MV skid, power conversion systems included, and what augmentation approaches exist to compensate for degradation and hold guaranteed capacity over the project lifetime — how the control architecture is layered: the BMS looks after the cells (SoC/SoH, balancing, temperature, overcharge protection), the PPC delivers P/Q setpoints and grid code compliance at the point of connection, the EMS decides when and why to charge or discharge, and SCADA watches over all of it — monitoring, telemetry, alarms, historian
Then there are the current trends. Grid-forming inverters I was already familiar with, but noise mitigation and fire safety were real eye-openers — especially the requirements around large-scale fire testing. The closing sections on financing and bankability landed better than I expected: it’s useful to understand what a lender looks at, not just what an engineer does.
The main takeaway: after this course, BESS is definitely no longer a black box. You start seeing one system instead of a set of disconnected pieces.
This isn’t an ad, just a personal opinion. But feel free to treat it as one 😁
