Vendor-neutral language you can paste into a tender for no-break industrial energy storage — plus how to measure what this problem is actually costing your plant, before anyone quotes you anything.
Do this before you talk to any supplier, including a conformant one. Without it you cannot size the system, justify the capital, or tell whether you have a problem at all.
Use a power quality analyser compliant with IEC 61000-4-30 Class A. Class S or a general-purpose logger will under-report short events, which are precisely the ones that stop production. Record for a minimum of 30 consecutive days; a full billing cycle plus a storm season is better.
Separate sags, swells, interruptions, transients and harmonic excursions. Record magnitude and duration for each. Most plants discover that their damaging events are sags of 100–500 ms that nobody logged, not the outages everyone remembers.
For each recorded event, check whether a line tripped, a batch was scrapped, or a process required re-validation. This correlation — not a vendor's brochure — is your business case.
Include scrap, restart labour, lost throughput at contribution margin, expedited freight, re-validation in regulated processes, and any customer penalty for a missed schedule. Divide by the measurement window to get an annualised exposure.
The measurement also tells you what to buy. The distribution of event durations tells you the required ride-through; the load profile during those events tells you the required power rating; your tariff structure tells you what the same asset can recover through peak shaving. A supplier who quotes before this data exists is guessing.
Paste this into your tender. It is written functionally, names no brand, and can be met by any manufacturer with the right architecture and listings. Replace the bracketed values with your own.
A system meeting clauses 2 through 7 in full satisfies the NB-BESS Open Standard v1.1. You do not need to reference the standard or the term in your tender for the specification to work — it is written to stand alone, and it should.
The specification tells you whether the equipment is right. This tells you whether the company behind it can still support the equipment in year twelve.
"Designed to UL 9540" and "listed to UL 9540" are different statements with different legal weight. Ask for the certificate and the file number, and verify it in the certification body's online directory yourself.
Ask each reference specifically: has the system ridden through a real grid event, and did they see the log afterwards? A supplier who cannot produce a customer who has experienced an event has an untested claim.
You are buying a fifteen-year asset. Ask for audited financials, insurance certificates, and the size of the installed base. A smaller supplier is not disqualified by this — but the answer belongs in the risk file, not in a surprise three years from now.
Source code or firmware escrow, documented spare parts sourcing, and a commitment that monitoring data remains accessible to you in an open format if the relationship ends. This costs the supplier little and protects you a lot.
Lithium storage inside a manufacturing building is a fire safety and insurance question before it is an energy question. Bring your fire marshal, EHS lead and property insurer in at specification stage, not at commissioning.
If your specification yields only one compliant bidder, expect your own procurement policy to require a sole-source justification. Keep the language functional rather than brand-linked so that any capable manufacturer can respond.
This template is published under an open license by the NB-BESS Open Standard initiative, founded by PulseVolt. Copy it, modify it, put it in your own tender documents. No attribution required and no permission needed.
If you find a clause that is ambiguous, unmeasurable, or that unfairly excludes a legitimate architecture, tell us — that feedback is how the standard improves.
Read the full Standard v1.1 →