How Grid Society increased battery energy storage system economic value up to 15% with Hexaly
Introduction
Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are becoming an essential component of commercial and industrial energy strategies. Maximizing their value, however, requires balancing multiple business objectives over long planning horizons while accounting for battery behavior, electricity prices, renewable generation, and grid constraints.
Grid Society uses Hexaly as the optimization engine for its energy management models, optimizing both battery sizing and operation. By integrating Hexaly, the next-generation MIP solver, into its engineering workflow, the company delivers more valuable storage projects while accelerating the development of commercial proposals and feasibility studies.
About Grid Society
Grid Society designs and integrates Battery Energy Storage Systems for commercial and industrial customers across Italy. Many of its customers operate manufacturing facilities equipped with on-site photovoltaic generation and face highly variable electricity costs.
For every project, the engineering team must determine how a storage system should charge and discharge over time to maximize its economic value while respecting both the battery’s physical characteristics and the contractual limits of the grid connection.
Optimizing battery energy storage systems
Every Battery Energy Storage System requires solving a complex planning optimization problem.
Grid Society must determine an optimal charging and discharging strategy over an extended planning horizon while simultaneously reducing electricity costs, lowering peak demand, and maximizing on-site renewable generation.
The mathematical optimization model must capture multiple business objectives together with battery operating constraints and grid connection limits. At the same time, it must produce economically efficient operating strategies for use during both project design and daily operations.
The limits of traditional MIP solvers
Earlier, Grid Society relied on one of the leading commercial, traditional MIP solvers to optimize battery operation. While this approach performed well for relatively simple models, computation times increased significantly as the optimization model evolved to capture longer planning horizons, multiple competing objectives, and increasingly realistic operational constraints.
As the complexity of the planning problem grew, solving large-scale optimization models became too slow for commercial proposals and feasibility studies, where engineers needed reliable results within a limited timeframe.
Why Hexaly for battery energy storage system optimization
Grid Society selected Hexaly as an MIP solver to power its energy management models.
The modeling approach enables the engineering team to accurately represent the economics of Battery Energy Storage Systems within a single optimization model while efficiently solving large-scale planning optimization problems.
Rather than treating storage sizing and operational planning as separate engineering activities, Grid Society uses the same optimization model throughout the project lifecycle. This unified optimization workflow enables engineers to evaluate design alternatives while simultaneously determining how each system should operate once deployed.
Hexaly’s next-generation MIP technology incorporates automated decomposition techniques, enabling efficient solution of complex planning problems while keeping the modeling process straightforward.
From system sizing to daily operations
Hexaly is integrated into Grid Society’s energy management platform as the optimization solver that computes optimal charging and discharging strategies.
The mathematical optimization model simultaneously considers electricity costs, peak-demand reduction, renewable-energy utilization, battery operating limits, and grid-connection constraints. This allows engineers to perform joint decision optimization for storage sizing and operational planning within a single optimization workflow, rather than relying on separate manual iterations.
The same optimization framework supports both day-to-day battery operation and feasibility studies during the design phase, providing a consistent engineering methodology across projects.
Results
Using Hexaly has significantly improved both engineering productivity and project delivery.
Compared with the previous implementation based on one of the leading commercial, traditional MIP solvers, Grid Society achieved approximately a 95% reduction in computation time, making optimization practical for commercial offers and engineering studies.
At the same time, the company estimates a 10 to 15% improvement in the economic value of each Battery Energy Storage System by optimizing system sizing and operational planning together rather than through separate manual iterations.
Additional benefits include:
- More consistent operating plans
- Faster and more credible feasibility studies
- Feasibility and sizing studies were completed in hours instead of days
These improvements allow Grid Society to apply mathematical optimization throughout the entire project lifecycle. Engineers can evaluate alternative storage configurations more quickly while consistently delivering higher-value operating plans for their customers.
Hexaly’s next-generation MIP techniques further contribute to the efficient solution of large-scale planning problems for modern Battery Energy Storage Systems.
Conclusion
As Battery Energy Storage Systems continue to grow in complexity, optimization is becoming a critical engineering capability rather than a standalone analytical exercise.
Grid Society’s experience illustrates how Hexaly extends the modeling and solution capabilities of traditional mixed-integer programming (MIP), making it practical to solve larger and more realistic planning problems without compromising model fidelity or engineering productivity.
By combining system sizing and operational planning into a single optimization workflow, Grid Society has made mathematical optimization integral to both project design and day-to-day operations. Faster solve times, more credible feasibility studies, and higher-value operating plans enable the engineering team to deliver more competitive energy storage projects while supporting better technical decisions at every stage.
Hexaly lets us model the real economics of an energy storage project and find an optimal plan in minutes. It has become a reliable part of how we design and operate our systems.
