BESS Studio/ inside the container

What five megawatt-hours
actually looks like.

A containerised LFP battery, generated from its cell specification: two banks of racks, 48 packs of 104 cells, the busbars that string them, the cold plates that cool them and the conductors that bring the current out. Change the topology, explode it, isolate a rack or a single cell, and read the design review beside it.

Topology

4 packs in series per string · 12 strings in parallel · 416S12P cell equivalent

View

Layers

Exploded view0%Lifts packs and cells apart. Conductors are hidden while exploded; assembled routing is retained.

Electrical path

PCS maximum voltage1500 VThe one equipment rating the concept checks itself against. Drop it below the string maximum and the design review turns red.

Loading the 3D viewer…

Nominal DC energy5,016 kWh48 packs · 104.50 kWh each

Nominal DC electricity2.508 MW2.00 hour system at 0.5 C

Cells4,99212 racks · LFP 314 Ah prismatic

String voltage1,040–1,518.4 V1,331.2 V nominal

Aggregate current1,884 A12 strings at 157 A

Enclosure11.3 × 2.4 × 3.1 mlength × height × width, internal

Selected · container

PartBESS

Size, mm11334.0 × 2400.0 × 3110.2

Electricity at max voltage2,861 kW

Electricity at min voltage1,959 kW

Cold plates48 parallel branches

Nominal DC electricity is not guaranteed constant AC output.

Design review · 1 error

source energy

Source pack label 104.45 kWh differs from calculated 104.4992 kWh (+0.0492).

pcs review

PCS compatibility unverified: operating voltage, current, fault and insulation ratings require review.

overvoltage

1,518.4 V exceeds the 1,500 V equipment limit by 18.4 V.

Concept engineering visualisation. Equipment ratings, detailed mechanical design and usable AC performance require validation. Geometry checks do not establish regulatory compliance. Routing uses defined corridors; bend radius is an unvalidated design assumption. Terminals and ancillaries are conceptual, and the cell data is the supplied specification.

What storage is for/ and what it is not

Four jobs,
priced differently.

Block matching

Shift contracted renewable generation from the hours it arrives to the hours you consume. This is the job that raises renewable share rather than just capacity.

Peak shaving

Cut the contract demand you are billed on, and ride through the short peaks that set it — blow moulding, compressors starting, a chiller stack coming up together.

Ride-through

Hold critical utilities across a grid disturbance. Worth most where an outage costs a batch rather than an hour.

Price arbitrage

Charge cheap, discharge dear, against the exchange. Real but modest, and the first thing to disappear when the spread narrows — never the reason to build.

The number that decides it. Discharge cost per kWh, not capital cost per kWh: the cells, the cycles they survive and the round-trip losses, priced per unit that actually comes back out. The container above is the physical side of that number; REplanner puts it beside the other sources of supply.

Size storage against a portfolio The open-source ESS explorer

In short/ BESS Studio

BESS Studio is a 3D walk-through of what a 5 MWh containerised lithium iron phosphate battery actually holds, and the checks a storage design concept has to pass.

The container is drawn to scale with its two banks of racks, 48 packs and 4,992 cells, the pack busbars, the high-voltage conductors, the cooling and the earth path. Layers can be peeled away, views switched, and two rack configurations compared. It exists so a buyer can see what five megawatt-hours is before sizing one.

What to take away

The reference design is a 5 MWh containerised LFP battery with 48 packs and 4,992 cells across two banks of racks.

What it assumes

A design concept, not a specification: thermal, fire, protection and grid-interface design are site- and vendor-specific.

Questions this page answers

Battery or thermal storage?

Whichever moves the constraint. If the problem is heat arriving at the wrong time, a thermal store is usually cheaper per unit shifted; if it is demand charges or electrical matching, a battery.

What decides storage economics?

Cost per kWh discharged over the asset's life — cycle count, depth and degradation — not capital cost per kWh installed. Arbitrage alone rarely carries the case.

Reviewed 2026-10-08 · jouleWisePlain-text version

Start/ one plant

Size it against
a real load profile.

Storage sizing is a block-by-block question. It starts with one year of metered consumption, which is the first thing a baseline produces.

Discuss your plant