Survey of BESS professionals highlights issues in rapidly growing industry
TWAICE Battery Storage Analytics has released a second edition of its BESS Pros Survey. Based on responses from more than 100 BESS sector professionals and built on last year’s results, the 2026 edition of the survey highlights a few key growing pains in the storage industry.
The survey tackles operational and technical challenges, as well as different industry approaches to O&M, and trends shaping the industry at large.
With the grid-scale BESS market growing at a rapid pace, the survey says performance and availability are the top challenges of the sector for 2026. Exactly 50% of the survey’s respondents reported performance and availability as top of mind issues, ranking 6% ahead of second place, which listed optimization of system revenue as the leading concern.
“Grid-scale BESS is entering a new phase,” says TWAICE CEO Stephan Rohr. “The industry has proven it can deploy at scale; now the question is whether operations can keep up. As portfolios expand, operational practices need to mature alongside that growth, so teams can manage complexity, resolve issues faster, and protect performance.”
Concerns of safety risks moved down this year, ranking as the top issue in just 22% of survey responses. That represents a 5% dip down from last year’s survey, which ranked third-last above “co-ordination with O&M teams” and “other.”
Industry trends and challenges
Nearly half of TWAICE’s survey respondents say they experience “unexpected on-site issues that require immediate maintenance or repair at least monthly.” Furthermore, 41% of respondents say that those issues lead to lost revenue at least most of the time, if not all of the time.
Time is money, and investigating those issues can be a major time sink, the survey says. 59% of survey respondents say that investigating incidents and analyzing the root cause “requires significant effort or time” in a team’s day to day activities.
“When unexpected issues occur, teams spend a disproportionate amount of time understanding what happened and how urgent it is, leading to constant firefighting and time pressure,” TWAICE’s research says.
The BESS industry is “still operating in a reactive mode” when it comes to these issues, according to the survey. The research finds that in addition to being disruptive and time-intensive, these issues cause strain on the small teams that often manage BESS products. That high number of issues, combined with the relatively high tolerance for them by asset owners, could present an issue when scaling these energy solutions.
So, the BESS industry’s trends have swung toward solving that problem.
Growth remains at the forefront of the sector, the research says, but “some teams are beginning to think more deliberately about how to scale effectively.” Priorities are evolving beyond hiring to the operational side of things, as companies need strong foundations to support their growing portfolios.
“As BESS teams look ahead, growth remains the dominant priority, both in expanding portfolios and maximizing revenues,” the company says. “A notable share of respondents also point to strengthening data infrastructure and tool integration, suggesting that some teams are already investing in the operational foundations needed to support scaling portfolios.”
Parsing and using relevant data
The vast majority (76%) of survey participants report using a suite of two of more tools—SCADA, EMS, vendor platforms, and the like—to manage and operate BESS assets. This has led about half of those same respondents report there being “no single source of truth” as a top challenge for their BESS management firm.
So, a lack of product management and general operational knowledge isn’t for lack of trying, according to Rohr.
“What stands out is not a lack of data in BESS operations, but the difficulty of turning that data into something teams can confidently act on,” he says. “As BESS deployments scale, trust and usability become just as important as access.”
Much like the lack of a single source of truth for these professionals, BESS-related performance analytics have no single concrete approach, the survey finds. A whopping 68% of respondents calculate KPIs themselves, rather than using supplier-reported KPIs (32%) or using third-party analytical platforms (34%).
“Operators often combine multiple approaches, highlighting that no single method is sufficient across all operational needs,” the survey says, “reinforcing earlier findings about a lack of a single source of truth.”
The report says that, in short, moving from data to usable, actionable insight is more difficult than it should be by now, thanks to that lack of truth, use of multiple tools, and “limited access to BESS data needed for operation.”
Grid-scale battery solutions have made it clear that BESS—with its high volumes of data and liability when it comes to unexpected issues—do not behave like other renewable energy assets.
“Once systems are live, operators encounter a range of surprises, from unexpected issues, to complex performance behavior, and data volumes that far exceed what other renewable assets produce,” the survey says. “This shift is exposing gaps between how BESS projects are planned and how they are ultimately operated – from reactive maintenance models and fragmented accountability, to data that exists but is difficult to turn into timely, trusted insight.”
