Automatic software update causes outage affecting around 800 Sungrow batteries in Germany

What happened

In early March 2023, around 800 battery storage systems sold in Germany by the Chinese manufacturer Sungrow were affected by an outage caused by an automatic software update, according to pv magazine. A company spokeswoman confirmed the number of affected devices and said that, for a few customers, it was not currently possible to store solar power produced by their photovoltaic systems. Sungrow did not say how many storage systems it has sold in Germany.

Several affected PV system owners reported the outages to pv magazine. According to the report, the battery management system unit must be replaced where storage devices fail. Sungrow could not yet say how long replacement units would take to deliver, though letters to installers suggested probably within a few weeks. It had not been decided who would bear the installation costs. The company advised customers to notify their installer when storage fails, and said installers could contact after-sales service, which would treat such requests with the highest priority.

Contributing factors

According to the source, the outage followed an automatic software update. No further technical root cause was given in the report.

Lessons learned

1. Firmware and software updates to battery management systems should be staged, tested on representative hardware and rolled out in small batches before fleet-wide deployment.
2. Operators should maintain a tested rollback route and monitor fleet state after every update so that a fault affecting many devices is detected quickly.
3. Installers and owners need a clear escalation path, a stock of replacement control units and a stated policy on who bears replacement costs before an incident occurs.

More lessons on detection and monitoring, maintenance, inspection and ageing assets, from every incident on the register.

Source

pv magazine (pv-magazine.com)