Australia’s BESS projects are scaling fast, but a critical networking gap is thwarting commissioning timelines.
The drawings passed review. The lab acceptance test went smoothly. But three days into commissioning, the battery management system can’t see the PCS, the SCADA historian is polling across the wrong VLAN, and nobody on site can explain why the redundancy protocol isn’t recovering the way it was supposed to.
The hardware isn’t faulty. The design intent was sound. The problem is that no single party owned the network, and by the time that became obvious, the containers were already on site.
This is one of the most common patterns seen in BESS projects across Australia, and it’s getting worse as deployments scale.
Three parties, three assumptions
On many BESS projects, the networking layer sits in a gap between three parties, and each one assumes someone else is handling it.
The OEM designs the container as a self-contained unit. Internal addressing, switch selection, and protocol behaviour are often standardised across every container they ship, regardless of the site requirements.
The systems integrator focuses on controls, power conversion, and grid compliance. They’ll specify the SCADA platform, define the control philosophy, and manage commissioning, but the network infrastructure that carries all that traffic is frequently treated as a procurement line item, not a design decision.
Inheriting whatever was built, the operator needs remote visibility, secure access for vendors, and confidence that a link failure won’t cascade into a protection event. But they’re often the last to see the network design… if a documented design even exists.
The result is a network that was never designed as a system. It was assembled from assumptions.
Why this matters for the future grid
A single-container BESS with one switch and a flat network can tolerate a fair amount of ambiguity. It’s not ideal, but the blast radius of a mistake is small.
That changes fast. As projects scale to multi-container sites with co-located solar, wind, or grid-forming inverters, the number of vendors, protocols, and traffic types multiplies. Each OEM brings its own IP scheme, which is often identical across every container they ship, while each integrator brings their own commissioning expectations. And the operator now needs segmentation, remote access, and cybersecurity controls across a network that was never designed holistically.
This is where the ownership gap becomes a project risk, not just an inconvenience. Unresolved addressing conflicts delay commissioning, missing segmentation creates cybersecurity blind spots, and when failover behaviour hasn’t been validated end-to-end, the first real fault becomes a painful discovery exercise rather than a simple recovery event.
Closing the gap early
The fix isn’t better technology, it’s better accountability. Someone needs to own the network as a system before the hardware ships. That means validating the topology against the control philosophy, resolving addressing conflicts before containers leave the factory, and ensuring failover behaviour works as intended, instead of discovering it during commissioning.
The projects that commission cleanly tend to be the ones where these conversations happen during design, not as a remediation exercise. The cost of addressing it early is measured in hours of engineering time, but the cost of addressing it late is measured in operational risk that follows an asset for years.
As a key provider of OT network design validation for Australian BESS and microgrid projects, Madison Technologies understands these risks well.
“The future grid depends on storage that performs predictably,” Madison solutions engineer team lead Corey Nesbitt said. “That starts with a network that someone actually owns.”
Download Madison Technologies’ BESS Connectivity FAQ at madison.tech/ot-connectivity-for-bess
This feature appeared in the June edition of Energy.
