“Whereas in the real-life day-to-day operation, it’s not uncommon for the owner-operator to see different values as the actual usable energy.”
Krol listed several quiet causes behind that divergence. Intermittent internal faults, derating, cell balancing, and a design quirk in which a project’s point of connection and its contracted point of guarantee can diverge, leaving an owner staring at reduced capacity while the supplier’s own metrics still read 100% availability.
“The supplier is not incentivised to investigate and rectify,” she said of that scenario.
Arzu Perwin, a commercial manager who has worked on battery storage projects from development through operations, added that even a technically intact warranty could leave an owner exposed if individual components underperformed without breaching the contract’s headline metrics.
Much of the discussion turned on language rather than hardware. Perwin said the definition of a “defect” in a contract matters more than developers often assume, particularly as multi-contract structures have become common on Australian projects.
