A Reliability Analysis and Comparison of Battery
Energy Storage Systems
Haiyang Liu
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
The University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
Email: haiyang.liu@student.manchester.ac.uk
Abstract—Several studies highlight the contribution of battery
energy storage systems (BESS) to the reliability of power systems,
as BESS can provide a wide range of services. However, less focus
has been given on evaluating the reliability of BESS and its effect
on the reliability of the overall power system. With this context,
this paper presents a methodology for assessing and analyzing the
reliability of BESS, considering different BESS configurations. In
particular, the proposed methodology considers the reliability of
the BESS components as well as evaluates the state of health
(SOH) of the BESS. Such an analysis can be beneficial to system
operators and planners on long term decision making about the
installation of BESS and component selection. The results clearly
highlight that the reliability of BESS may be influenced by
different configurations and, critically, different parts of BESS
have different impacts on the reliability of BESS.
Index Terms—Battery energy storage systems (BESS), power
systems, reliability, resilience, state of health (SOH).
I. INTRODUCTION
Planning and operating current electric power systems are
challenging as the generation needs to meet the demand at any
time. The main reason is that the generation has to meet the
costumers’ demand while the demand is varying all the time.
As a result, adequate generation needs to be planned for to meet
this demand variability and to ensure system security [1]. In
order to meet the real-time demand, the operating capacity
should be, for example, 20% higher than the estimated demand,
but only 55% of the capacity is utilized each year [2].
Energy storage seems an attractive solution to support a
secure electricity supply. The surplus generation (e.g., from
renewable energy sources) can be stored into battery energy
storage systems (BESS) and then connected to the grid. Then
relevant ancillary services can be provided when required, such
as frequency and voltage regulation, congestion management,
etc.
From the studies in [4-7], it is evident that by installing
energy storage, the reliability of power systems can be
improved. From the results in [6,7], the duration of power
outages was reduced and the reliability indices (ENS, SAIDI
978-1-5386-8218-0/19/$31.00 © 2019 IEEE
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Mathaios Panteli
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
The University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
Email: mathaios.panteli@manchester.ac.uk
and CAIDI) were also improved. Also based on the economic
analysis in [8], a positive net present value (NPV) was caused
by installing batteries for utilizing the automatic peak-shaving
strategy, which means the battery energy storage was proved
valuable with specific electricity rates and appropriate dispatch
control (for example, automated peak-shaving).
A BESS contains several components, mainly including
battery cells, converter system, supervisory system, and battery
management system (BMS). As several studies were carried out
to find out how the BESS would improve the reliability of
power systems, only few studies focus on the reliability of
BESS per se. In studies [4-5], the battery systems were
modelled in a similar way with distributed generators (DGs),
where, however, the reliability of these DGs was neglected.
Also, for different BESS, different configurations and
technologies may be applied, which may have different impacts
on the reliability of BEES and in turn on the overall power
system reliability. Moreover, a systematic reliability evaluation
and assessment is also beneficial for optimizing the efficiency
of BMSs, as detailed information on the health and status of the
batteries will support the improvement and optimal control of
the BESS performance, and the battery life can also be
prolonged [1,9]. The study in [10] shows a reliability study on
BESS, and it proves that parallel configuration is more reliable
than series configuration. However, regarding the reliability
evaluation of each battery cell and state of health (SOH)
evaluation, it uses a Monte Carlo stochastic approach that does
not capture the complete picture of the problem since the
stochastic process can only give a fuzzy evaluation.
In this light, a systematic reliability evaluation of BESS
should be carried out not only for an accurate determination of
the impact on power systems but also to evaluate how much
reliable information about the battery state can be accessed and
utilized by the BMSs. This paper proposes a comprehensive
reliability analysis considering both the failure rates of the
individual components and their state of health (SOH). Several
comparisons among different topology configuration settings
are carried out to find out how different topology configurations
would influence the reliability of a BESS. Also, a sensitivity
study on the components' failure rates is performed to
determine how the components of each configuration would
affect the reliability of BESS. Such an evaluation would be
beneficial for the system operators’ decision-making on the
most reliable configuration selection. Also, the sensitivity
analysis would be helpful to system operators and planners
about long term strategy selection about system reliability
improvement. Compared with previous studies, SOH is
considered in this study, which enables the system operator to
realize the influence of different usage strategies to the capacity
of batteries. Then the well-informed decision-making on
battery allocation and BESS configuration setting can be
determined so that a proper strategy about battery dispatch and
maintenance can be determined.
The structure of this paper is as follows: the reliability
analysis procedure is presented in Section II. In Section III, the
proposed methodology is applied and demonstrated using
different BESS configurations. Finally, Section IV concludes
the paper.
II. METHODOLOGY
This section introduces the main BESS reliability
evaluation procedure and how to calculate the state of health
which can be used to determine the status of the battery
capacities.
A. Reliability Evaluation of Batteries
From recent studies [11,12], the reliability of the batteries
can be mainly evaluated by their failure rates, and the number
of charging/discharging cycles.
If the failure rate of a component is known, the reliability of
this component can be calculated as follows [13]:
= (− )
where R is the reliability of the component, λ (/hour) is the
failure rate, and t (hours) is the cycle life duration of the
component.
In order to improve the reliability of a system, redundant
branches are usually used. When there are redundant battery
branches, an ‘m out of n’ strategy is used which means among
n branches, m of them must remain operational to ensure the
efficient and uninterruptible functionality of the system. Then
the reliability of such BESS configurations can be calculated by
equation (2):
( , )= (1 − )
where is the reliability of one branch.
100%
Reliability (%)
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
0 100 200 300 400 500 600
Number of Cycles
Fig.1 The reliability of the battery changes as the usage increases
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From [12], the reliability of a battery would decrease as the
usage increases, and an example of such reliability degradation
is shown in Fig.1.
B. State of Health (SOH) Evaluation
The usage of the battery has an impact on the capacity of
the battery over a long period. SOH is used to describe this
capacity fade (i.e., capacity degradation). SOH represents the
percentage of the current battery capacity compared with the
original capacity as shown by equation (3) [14].
= / (3)
The capacity fade is related mainly to temperature, C-rate
(discharging rate) and the usage of the battery. It can be
calculated by equation (4) [14].
−31700 + 370.3 × (4)
∆ = ∙ exp( ) ∙ ( ℎ)
where B is the pre-exponential factor, T (K) is the absolute
temperature, R is the gas constant which is equal to 8.31
J/mol·K, z is the power law factor which is equal to 0.55
approximately and Ah is the Ah-throughput which is equal to
(cycle number)×(depth of discharging)×(full cell capacity). ∆Q
represents the percentage of capacity fading compared with the
full capacity.
III. CASE STUDIES
In this section, the reliability analysis described in Section
II is firstly demonstrated through a reliability analysis
comparison among five different configuration topologies to
illustrate the impact of different configuration topologies on the
reliability of BESS. Then a redundancy case is shown to
demonstrate the impact of redundant branches on the reliability
(1) of BESS. A study of SOH is also carried out to compare the
battery usage strategies.
A. Reliability analysis of a BESS consisting of 40 cells
considering different BESS configurations
Different interfacing configurations may impact the
reliability of BESS. The reliability comparison is made among
five different topology configurations which include three
common configurations (single-stage, two-stage and three-
stage) and two fault-tolerant configurations (Cascaded
Multilevel Converter based topology and Cascaded Multilevel
Converter based topology with integrated DC-DC converter).
The circuits of the five different topologies are shown in Fig. 2
(2) to Fig. 6.
A single-stage converter topology (referred to as ‘single-
stage’ later on) connects the batteries through a DC/AC
converter. The advantage of this configuration is that it can
reach a high-level converter efficiency of over 95% [11]. Based
on the circuit shown in Fig.2, the failure rate of this
configuration can be calculated by equation (5).
=( ∙ )+( )+ (5)
where N is the total number of battery cells, is the failure
700
rate of a battery cell, is the failure rate of the DC-AC
converter and is the failure rate of the filter circuit.
 The two-stage converter topology (referred to as ‘two-
stage’ later on) configuration shown in Fig.3 is widely used to
connect the batteries to the main grid. Compared with the
single-stage configuration of Fig. 2, it connects the batteries to
the grid through a DC-DC boost converter firstly, which
reduces the voltage level of the battery side and ensures a stable
DC link voltage. In this way, the number of batteries connected
in series is reduced.

The failure rate of this configuration can be calculated by

equation (6).
=( ∙ )+( )+( )+ (6)
The three-stage converter topology (referred to as ‘three-
stage’ later on) shown in Fig. 4 is most widely used in
transmission networks. Compared with the previous two Fig.5 Cascaded Multilevel Converter based topology
configurations, it has a high-frequency transformer to boost the
voltage from the battery side. Its failure rate can be calculated
by equation (7).
Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 show the two Cascaded Multilevel
Converter based topologies (referred to as ‘CMC-base’ and
‘CMC-DCDC’ as abbreviations later on), which are fault-
tolerant configurations. The main advantage is that the inherent
modularity design can increase the reliability of the BESS [15].
The failure calculations are shown in equation (8) and (9).
=( ∙ )+( )+( )+ (7)

Fig.6 Cascaded Multilevel Converter based topology with integrated

DC-DC converter
=( ∙ )+( ) (8)
=( ∙ )+( )+( ) (9)

Fig.2 Single-stage converter topology configuration The reliability of the different topologies can be estimated
based on equation (1). The failure rate of a battery cell is
assumed to be equal to 7.7 × 10 /ℎ [11], and the failure rates
of other components are assumed here based on the Military
Handbook MIL-HDBK217F [16] (Table 1). The batteries are
assumed to be constantly online, and series configuration and
parallel configuration are also considered. The total number of
batteries is assumed to be 40. For the parallel configuration, 2-
branch and 4-branch configurations are considered to compare
the impact of increasing the number of branches. The reliability
comparison is shown below in Fig.7 (where ‘-2branch’ means
Fig.3 Two-stage converter topology configuration the parallel configuration with 2 branches, ‘-4branch’ means
the parallel configuration with 4 branches and ‘-series’ means
the series configuration).
Table.1 The failure rates of components of BESS
Component λ(/h)
switch (400V, 30A) 1.386
switch (200V, 30A) 0.924
boost inductance(1mH) 0.0002
DC-link capacitor (10mF, 400V) 0.0121
filter inductances (5mH and 1mH) 0.0002
filter capacitance (100μF) 0.0042
Fig.4 Three-stage converter topology configuration transformer 0.0502

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 94% 93% 92%
100% 80.00% 61% 58%
56%
Reliability

Reliability
80% 60.00%
60% 40.00%
42% 43% 42%
20.00% 7% 1% 6%
40%
0.00%
20% 6% 6% 6%
0%

Fig.9 The reliability comparison with considering redundancy (t=1 year)

approach is to use redundant branches to ensure power supply

Fig.7 The comparison of different topology configurations (t=1 year)
For a fixed number of cells, the parallel configuration
improves the BESS reliability significantly, and more branches
will lead to higher reliability. Also, it can be found that the
impact of using different topologies on the reliability is much
smaller than the impact of using different number of branches.
In order to investigate how each component of the BESS
may affect the reliability of BESS, a sensitivity study is carried
out. In this analysis, the reliability of each component of the
BESS is changed as / , where λ is the failure rate assumed
for each component (Table 1) and x is an integer number used
to change the failure rates. In this analysis, x is varied in the
range of [0, 15]. Then its impact on the overall BESS reliability
is calculated. The comparison is made between changing the
reliability of battery cells and the reliability of circuit
connection components (excluding the batteries) so that the
dominant part on reliability can be determined. From the
results in Fig.7, different topology selections only have a small
influence on the reliability of BESS, so only two topologies
(i.e., single-stage and double-stage) are chosen to make the
comparison. The comparison results are shown in Fig.8.
It can be found from Fig.8 that the results of changing the
reliability of battery cells (Fig. 8.b) are similar to the results of
changing the reliability of all components (Fig. 8.a). Thus, for
the reliability of the whole BESS, the reliability of battery cells
takes the dominant influence. Hence, these results show that
improving the reliability of battery cells would be an attractive
solution for improving the overall BESS reliability.
B. Assessing the impact of redundancy on the reliability of
BESS
In order to improve the reliability of BESS, a common
single
100%
80%
Reliability
continuity in case of potential branches’ failures.
To proceed with the redundancy study, several assumptions
need to be developed to set the BESS modelling data. The
following input data is assumed:
•The battery cell: Lithium Ion, 6V, 250Ah, maximum C-
rate=4C
•Switches: 400V (70 DC-AC cells), 200V (40 DC-DC cells)
•Redundancy strategy: double the cells and assume 10 cells
each module (i.e. 140 cells for CMC-base and 80 cells for two-
stage and CMC-DCDC) then for the reliability ’m out of n’
calculation, 40 out of 80 for TWO-stage configuration and
CMC-DCDC, 70 out of 140 for CMC-base
The redundancy cases were applied to different topologies
in order to thoroughly quantify the effect of redundancy. Three
topologies are chosen arbitrarily to apply the redundancy study
(i.e., the two-stage topology, CMC topology (CMC) and CMC
topology with DC-DC converter (CMC-DCDC)) since it has
been shown that using different topologies has a very small
impact on the reliability of BESS. The results are shown below
in Fig.9 (‘-R’ represents the setting with redundancy).
It can be clearly found that compared with the impact of
redundant branches, the impact of different topologies is much
smaller. The reliability will be improved with redundant
branches added. Also, if a component has been used for a long
time, the reliability fades very fast as Fig.9 shows the reliability
of the BESS system used for one year. With redundant branches
installed, the components using becomes flexible. However, the
cost will also increase since there will be more cells and other
components so the balance should be considered.
two-series two-2branch two-4branch
100% 100%
80% 80%

Reliability
Reliability

60% 60% 60%

40% 40% 40%
20% 20% 20%
0% 0% 0%
0 5 10 15 0 5 10 15 0 5 10 15
x x x
a. Change the reliability of all components b. Change the reliability of batteries c. Change the reliability of circuit connection
components
Fig.8 The statistical reliability analysis

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 Table.2 The SOH of different configuration when reliability of all the
cells reduce to 50%
SOH (%)
C-RATE
1 branch 2 branches 4 branches
0.1 95.87 96.46 96.95
96.83 97.46 98.56
1
2 97.07 97.84 98.27
C. Usage Case Study with SOH considered
In this part, the usage of batteries is considered to find out
the impact of different usage strategies on SOH and reliability.
The batteries in this part are the same as those in Section III-
B. It is assumed that there are 40 cells in total, and the
temperature would be controlled to be 15 ℃. The total number
of branches is set to be 4 (10 cells for each branch). The
threshold of the reliability was set to be 50% to find out the
SOH when the battery fails (i.e., the battery will be considered
to be failed if its reliability is below 50%). From Fig. 1, the
reliability will reduce to 50% when the cycle number is 478.
Table.2 below shows the SOH of the used batteries with
different discharge rates. The C-rate in the table is the C-rate
when only one branch is used.
When the reliability reaches the threshold of 50%, it can be
found that with more branches used, the SOH is higher. With
more branches used, the C-RATE of each battery is reduced.
As a result, the capacity fading is getting slower. However, the
capacity fading is much slower than reliability fading even with
only one branch so for long term consideration, it is not worth
to use multi-branches at the same time.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a reliability analysis approach, where
different BESS topology configurations are compared, and a
sensitivity study about the influence of the reliability of
different components is also demonstrated.
From the reliability comparison, it can be clearly found that
parallel configuration is more reliable than series configuration,
and more branches further increase the reliability. Also, using
different topologies causes less impact on the reliability of the
system than adding more branches. Among all components, the
reliability of battery cells takes the dominant influence.
The reliability will be improved with redundant branches
added. However, the cost will also increase since there will be
more cells and other components so the cost-reliability balance
should be considered.
From the case study of usage and SOH, it is shown that it is
not beneficial to use multi-branches at the same time since with
more batteries being used at the same time, when their
reliability reaches the threshold, the SOH is still high, and hence
a portion of the capacity is not utilized.
Further work will reference more reliability data of the
components within a BESS. Then the upper and lower limit of
the reliability of a BESS can be identified so that the reliability
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can be determined more accurately within a certain level of
confidence.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to acknowledge the partial financial
support provided by the EU H2020 project CROSSBOW
(Contract No. 773430).
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