VUPET Project: Next-Generation Battery Energy Storage and Management

The VUPET project is dedicated to designing a next-generation battery energy storage and management system capable of addressing both current and future challenges in the electricity sector. Its goal is to integrate innovative technical solutions with regulatory, market, and user-driven requirements, ensuring long-term competitiveness and adaptability.

Modular and Hierarchical System Architecture

From a technical perspective, VUPET builds on a modular and hierarchical battery energy storage architecture (BESS):

• Battery Management Unit (BMU): The lowest level monitors individual cell voltage, temperature, and balance.
• String Battery Management System (SBMS): Aggregates data from groups of modules to ensure reliable performance at the string level.
• Master BMS (MBMS): Coordinates multiple strings and applies system-wide protection strategies.
• Energy Management System (EMS): At the top of the hierarchy, the EMS serves as the central hub, interfacing with external grids, markets, and users.

This architecture ensures safety, resilience, and scalability by allowing additional modules to be integrated seamlessly. It also supports advanced functionalities such as firmware updates, remote monitoring, and multi-point grid connections – features essential for future smart grids.

Market and Regulatory Integration

The project emphasizes market and regulatory integration, exploring how storage systems can participate in various electricity markets in Hungary and across Europe. Key considerations include:

• MAVIR requirements for system-level services, including Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR), Automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR), black-start capability, and voltage/reactive power control.
• Distribution-level flexibility and pilot initiatives like E.ON’s FlexON program, which engages local resources to support the grid.

These developments show that storage solutions serve not only national grid operators but also distribution companies and local energy communities.

Non-Commercial Applications

Beyond market participation, VUPET also addresses non-commercial applications of energy storage:

• Peak shaving and time-shifting for cost optimization
• Backup supply (UPS) for critical consumers
• Congestion management to prevent network overload
• Deferral of costly grid investments

In these roles, storage increases reliability, reduces risks, and provides resilience against outages or fluctuations – even without direct market revenues. It demonstrates added value for both households and businesses.

Innovation Through Revenue Stacking

A major innovation in VUPET is “parallel stacking” or “revenue stacking”. Using the Virtual State of Charge (VSOC) approach, one physical storage system can be split into multiple virtual units, each dedicated to a specific service, such as:

• Self-consumption optimization
• Market arbitrage
• Frequency regulation

The project develops algorithms to dynamically allocate storage resources across these functions in real time, based on technical constraints, market signals, and user priorities. This ensures maximum utilization of storage assets, improves business cases, and shortens payback times.

Stakeholder Insights

VUPET also incorporates insights from questionnaires and market surveys among industrial players, SMEs, and Hungary’s first energy community. Findings include:

• Most stakeholders either already operate storage units or plan to do so soon.
• Self-consumption optimization and energy trading are top priorities.
• Public subsidies and grant programs remain essential due to long payback periods, often exceeding ten years.

These insights highlight the importance of supportive policy frameworks to accelerate storage adoption.

Conclusion

The VUPET project represents a comprehensive approach to energy storage, combining technical innovation, regulatory compliance, market readiness, and user-driven design. It offers a vision for modular, scalable, and intelligent battery systems that can serve multiple purposes simultaneously – from stabilizing the electricity grid and integrating renewables to enabling new business models for companies and communities.

By addressing both present-day requirements and future possibilities, VUPET paves the way for a new generation of energy storage solutions that are technically advanced, economically viable, and socially beneficial.