UK-based battery intelligence platform Elysia, owned by Fortescue, will expand its services through the acquisition of US onsite control company Zitara.
Zitara will be integrated into Elysia’s battery intelligence portfolio, with a focus on the battery energy storage systems (BESS) market.
Exclusively spoken against Solar energy portalElysia President Tim Engstrom described the move as “truly connecting battery intelligence with battery action, from cloud to site.”
“The way we see it, the missing link in many of the battery intelligence stacks you see in the market today is that the insights stay in the cloud.” Elysia, a branch of Australia-based green technology, energy and metals company Fortescue, offers both cloud and embedded software to improve the performance, lifespan and safety of batteries in the automotive, heavy industry and stationary storage sectors.
Zitara provides on-site monitoring and control for grid-scale energy storage. In the same conversation with Solar energy portalZitara co-founder and company executive vice president Shyam Srinivasan described the addition of Zitara to the Elysia stack as “a new vector.”
Particularly where Elysia offers solutions for automotive and other applications, Zitara’s success lies in the battery chemistry and form factors common in large-scale storage.
Both had their start in industrial, automotive and stationary storage, but Zitara pivoted: “instead of providing low-level algorithms to OEMs as Elysia has done in the past, we now offer an on-premise monitoring and control solution that is a retrofit to third-party BESS,” said Srinivasan.
Engstrom added that Zitara will expand Elysia’s presence in the US, with a focus on the stationary BESS market. Elysia is headquartered in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, with satellite operations in London, Europe, the US and Australia; “Zitara is integrated into Elysia’s battery intelligence, but is empowered to lead our battery intelligence offering for BESS.”
The acquisition includes “the best of Zitara’s combination of skills, talents and intellectual property,” leveraging the company’s focus on the BESS market.
“The BESS market not only needs more web dashboards and analytics platforms to tell you something is wrong, but it also needs a mechanism to act on that insight. And this is exactly what Zitara has with their Zitara for BESS product,” Engstrom added.
Zitara will continue to operate as a brand, folded into Elysia as a control layer. Srinivasan explains, “If we discover a security issue using an Elysia algorithm, instead of turning a dashboard red somewhere like analytics solutions do, we can shut down that rack and help get the process going so that a truck can roll out and operate the unit.”
As part of its plan to operate its mining operations in Australia with net zero emissions by 2030, Fortescue plans to deploy 4 to 5 GWh of large-scale energy storage systems.
Somewhat unusually, Fortescue has developed internal battery intelligence, building on this with the Zitara acquisition. Engstrom said that in addition to building and operating the sites, “to achieve the lowest cost position, we do so by operating smarter than others.”
“The Zitara and Elysia technology, combined in our operations, provides us with a high-speed proving ground.”
Fortescue will be among the first to take advantage of the full suite, deploying the Elysia-Zitara combo on its large-scale BESS installations in Pilbara, Australia. Srinivasan said Fortescue is Zitara’s biggest bet.
Zitara is already deployed at sites with more than 100 MW in Texas and has customers in Great Britain and Australia. Srinivasan said the company’s customers in those regions will see continued support “now with the power of Elysia behind us.”
