New Course: Quality Fundamentals for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)

Quality teams that cut their teeth on utility-scale PV are now being handed battery storage scope too. The inspection habits that work on tracker rows don’t carry over cleanly, because the defects that cost the most on a battery project sit where a walkthrough can’t see them.

Julie Stiglish built her new HeatSpring course around that challenge. Quality Fundamentals for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) walks quality teams through a battery project from the factory to the year-one retest.

Why battery quality needs its own playbook

Julie organized the course around three things that separate BESS quality work from the PV work many students may already be familiar with. 

• Most of the scope is hidden. On a PV site, a trained inspector walking the rows can spot most of what matters. On a battery project, the expensive defects live inside sealed enclosures, in firmware, or in a dataset. The course teaches you to read the hardware and read the data.
• The supplier is a black box. Owners buy an integrated product from an integrator, who buys cells from an OEM that won’t open its factory doors. That makes quality a contracts-and-records job well before anyone works onsite. Factory quality gets a full module here, with no equivalent in Julie’s solar course.
• The guarantees get measured. Capacity, round-trip efficiency, availability, and degradation are tested at year zero and retested every year for a decade or more. Good quality work produces baselines that hold up. Weak quality work produces arguments.

What’s inside the course

The course includes 9 content modules and is self-paced. Every module follows one scenario project, a fictional battery site called Ocotillo Draw, from the factory to the year-one retest. Each lesson opens on a problem the quality team has to solve. Here’s some of what you’ll learn:

1. Why Battery Quality Fails Differently. Why defect costs climb faster on BESS than PV, and who owns QA, QC, and commissioning on a typical contract structure.
2. Contracts, Standards, and the Rules of the Game. Which document governs a field dispute, how to read a capacity and RTE guarantee, and where hold points belong in an ITP.
3. Factory Quality, FAT and Traceability. How to scope a factory acceptance test that produces usable evidence, and why cell-level serialization is a contract term.
4. Receiving, Siting, and Mechanical Installation. Receiving inspections that survive a damage claim, plus anchorage, fire separation, and cooling system checks.
5. Electrical QA/QC: Racks, PCS, and the MV Collection. Torque programs at rack scale, reading IR and continuity results as a population, and the grounding joints that get missed.
6. Controls, Communications, and the BMS/EMS Chain. Point-to-point checkout that proves an alarm reaches the operator, and firmware version control.
7. Commissioning, Performance Testing, and Safety. Witnessing capacity and RTE tests against contract conditions, and verifying safety systems by test instead of by submittal.
8. Nonconformance, Records, Turnover and the Long Tail. Writing NCRs that define the affected population, root cause analysis, and a turnover package that supports warranty claims years later.

The course wraps with a final quiz and a certificate of completion you can share on LinkedIn.

Meet your instructor

Julie Stiglish has 25 years in electrical construction, the last 16 of them in utility-scale solar. She founded JS Renewable Energy Group, a consulting firm in Arizona that provides owner-side QA/QC oversight and independent inspection for utility-scale PV and storage projects. Her firm’s portfolio spans more than 5 GW of solar and storage construction.

Before starting her own practice, Julie spent years at First Solar providing safety and quality oversight to both the EPC and manufacturing groups. That gave her a view of quality from the factory floor to the field, which shows up directly in this course’s factory quality module. She is a licensed Master Electrician in multiple states and a Certified Electrical Inspector.

Julie will be in the course discussion board answering student questions during your year of access.

Enroll today

The course is self-paced, with 12 months of access and Julie answering questions on the discussion board.

Training a QA/QC or commissioning team? Visit the For Teams page for group pricing.

Enroll in Quality Fundamentals for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)!

Check out Julie’s solar courses

New to Julie’s teaching, or want to sharpen your PV quality skills first? Both of her solar courses are open now. 

10 Utility-Scale Solar Defects Hiding in Plain Sight (free) 

A quick look at the defects Julie sees on utility-scale sites, and a good way to get a feel for how she teaches before you commit to a full course. Enroll free!

Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals

Julie’s full course on owner’s-side quality for utility-scale PV, built around her argument that the same defect costs $2 at installation and $2 million in operation. Taking it alongside the BESS course covers quality for both sides of a solar-plus-storage project. View the course here!