How BW ESS Built a Unified Data Platform for a Global BESS Portfolio

At BW ESS we develop, own, and operate battery energy storage systems across six countries — the UK, Australia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. As our portfolio has grown, so has the number of people and systems that need access to our operational data. Here’s how we ended up rethinking that side of the business, and what it taught us about scaling a BESS fleet with speed, efficiency and reliability.

Who we are

We’re part of BW Group, which brings decades of global infrastructure experience to how we develop and operate our projects. Today, we have more than 540 MWh of BESS in operation across the Nordics and the UK. Alongside around 11 GWh under construction and a development pipeline of roughly 8 GW across our markets. That growth shows up in projects like Klostermansfeld in Germany, a up-to 5.7 GWh system that will likely be one of the largest battery storage projects in Europe once it’s built, and in acquisitions like the 1 GWh Yanco BESS in Australia. We take a long-term view of every project and partnership, and we’re focused on unlocking value across the full lifecycle of our storage assets.

Managing various sites across markets means we generate astronomical amounts of operational data, and making sense of it is its own challenge.

Where we started

Before Ardexa, collecting and storing our BESS data worked tactically, but it wasn’t built to scale. Like many asset owners, we were juggling a wide array of site-level systems, OEM requirements, analytics platforms, and cybersecurity obligations that differ country by country, and none of it meshed in a clean or standardized way.

The bigger issue was how many different parties needed access to the same underlying data. It had to flow to us, to our OEMs under LTSA obligations, to our analytics systems, and into our internal reporting. Without a proper data acquisition layer sitting underneath, it became increasingly fragmented: different systems, different logins, manual workarounds, duplicated effort across teams, and it became difficult to know which system was the single source of truth.

What we needed instead

As more of our assets came online, each one producing massive volumes of high-frequency data, it became clear we didn’t want to build a different data setup for every project in every country. Do that enough times and you end up managing multiple SCADA systems, inconsistent formats, and too much manual work standing between the data and any useful insight. We wanted a secure, reliable, and repeatable data layer instead, one that could support both our reporting and our growing compliance requirements.

Ardexa gave us a practical way to standardize data acquisition across the portfolio. It collects data from the various systems on site, manages the hardware layer, and routes the right data to the right platforms, without us having to build and maintain a bespoke setup for every asset. That mattered because our goal was to find key suppliers we could replicate across projects spread across the globe, not end up managing a different solution at every site.

What it comes down to is a secure, managed, and scalable data acquisition layer for our BESS portfolio. Instead of fragmented, site-by-site infrastructure, we have one consistent platform that supports operations, analytics, OEM requirements, and cybersecurity governance. It gets the right structured data from a large portfolio of assets to the right people and systems, reliably and securely, without us reinventing the setup every time.

How the partnership works

Scaling a multi-country portfolio means coordinating a lot of moving parts across different teams and markets, and that’s why the working relationship with Ardexa has mattered as much as the product. Onboarding and data configuration look a little different at every site, so we needed a team willing to work through those details with us directly rather than hand us a fixed process and leave us to make it fit. That’s what’s happened in practice. When something’s come up during onboarding, or we’ve needed to adjust how data is configured for a particular site, Ardexa has worked it through with us instead of routing us into a generic support process.

The same holds for planning ahead. As we look at where the portfolio is headed, the team has been proactive about how the solution needs to scale with us, rather than waiting for us to raise it. That’s the difference between a supplier relationship and a partnership: they’re thinking about our next set of sites before we’ve finished asking about them.

What this means as we keep growing

Reliable OT data is critical to scaling and optimising a portfolio like ours. As we add assets across more markets, we need confidence that the data coming out of every site is accurate, accessible, and structured in a way that supports both day-to-day operations and long-term asset management. It’s what lets us understand how assets are performing, catch issues earlier, support technical and commercial analysis, and make better decisions across the business. It also gives us a stronger foundation for working with our trading and operational partners, who all depend on high-quality operational data themselves.

As the portfolio grows, reliable OT data is what keeps the increasing complexity manageable. Instead of treating every new project as its own data challenge, it gives us one consistent basis for managing performance, risk, and reporting across BW ESS globally.