In This
Article
In this edition, our CEO Alon makes the case that more data isn't what's holding back battery financing, trust in the business case is, and PJM is the clearest example of why. We also share what two roundtables on opposite coasts turned up about financing, data quality and accountability gaps in storage.
Plus: a closer look at what it takes to verify a battery is hitting the returns it was underwritten for.
Want to chat in person? Meet us at RE+ next month!
01
STRATEGY
CEO Perspective: The Industry Doesn't Need More Data. It Needs Better Decisions.
Alon Maskovich
CEO
We've never had more data in renewable energy, and never had more uncertainty about the decisions that matter most.
Our industry has spent years digitizing. Operators today have more telemetry, more dashboards, more analytics, more AI than at any point before. Yet in nearly every conversation I have with developers, asset owners, lenders, EPCs and investors the same question comes up: if we have this much data, why is it still so hard to make a confident call?
Because data alone doesn't create confidence. A lender doesn't finance a battery because there's more telemetry behind it. An asset owner doesn't prioritize maintenance because another dashboard flagged an issue. An operator doesn't trust an AI recommendation just because a sophisticated model produced it. Organizations act when they trust what's behind the number, not when there's simply more of it.
PJM makes the point clearly. On paper it should be one of the strongest storage markets in the US: data center demand is pushing capacity prices up, peak charges remain high, and the commercial case for batteries has never looked better. Yet plenty of strong projects still can't get financed.
The problem usually isn't the market. It's confidence in the model behind it.
Across financing conversations I keep seeing the same gaps: revenue assumptions that don't match how the asset actually operates, business cases built on a few months of history instead of a full cycle, degradation models that are too optimistic about long-term output. Different developers, different projects. The assumptions in the model haven't earned the lender's trust.
AI is speeding this up, not slowing it down. A model that used to take a week can be built in an hour. But speed was never the constraint. Accuracy was, and still is. As AI makes it easier to generate a financial case quickly, the advantage shifts to whoever can defend their assumptions, not whoever produces them fastest.
This isn't really a data problem, but a context problem: operational performance that isn't connected to financial impact, engineering assumptions that don't reflect real-world conditions, contracts that sit apart from execution.
More dashboards don't close those gaps. A shared source of truth between the operational and financial sides does.
That's the shift I expect to define the next few years of this industry: not who collects the most data, but who can trust, and defend, the decisions built on it. It's the problem we built Energy Business Management to solve.
— Alon Mashkovich, CEO, enSights
Key takeaways
More data doesn't automatically produce better decisions — trusted business context does.
Strong market fundamentals don't close financing deals on their own; defensible assumptions do, and PJM shows why.
As AI makes modeling faster, the premium shifts to data quality and validation, since speed stops being a differentiator once everyone has it.
Monitoring created visibility and analytics created understanding; the next step is connecting that intelligence to execution so decisions can actually be defended.
Market signal
Across conversations with developers, lenders, investors, and asset owners, the question has shifted from "can storage generate attractive returns" to "can those returns be defended with evidence." As battery storage matures, a business case is judged less by its upside and more by how well it holds up under scrutiny.
02
NEWS
Industry News
As data centre expansion drives electricity demand in PJM, creating favourable conditions for BESS deployment, why are developers struggling to secure financing?
In an exclusive interview with Energy Storage News, enSights CEO Alon Mashkovich explained that developers are struggling to analyse complex revenue stacks, which combine utility savings, demand charge reductions, energy arbitrage and capacity payments. Many are using inaccurate data and assumptions that don’t reflect actual performance, making it difficult to justify investments to boards, lenders and finance teams.
Alon emphasised that improving data accuracy and linking operational performance to financial outcomes will be essential to building robust investment cases that help critical projects move forward.
03
PRODUCT UPDATES
AI Root-Cause Analysis, SREC Reporting, and More
Nissan Hazzan
Vice President of Products
New UI now generally available
The redesigned enSights.ai interface is out of beta and available to all users.
The update is focused on day-to-day user tasks and workflows rather than a visual refresh alone.
Knowledge base center and AI assistant
An in-product AI assistant now answers "how-to" questions, including navigation, page location, and configuration.
A full knowledge base is also available for more in-depth reading: https://ensights.productfruits.help/en
AI root-cause analysis
Any insight or alert, business or technical, can now be investigated automatically for root cause.
Findings are directly actionable: users can open a service call or notify another team member from the same flow.
SREC reporting
enSights.ai is now a certified SREC reporter in Massachusetts for MassCEC.
The new module automatically reports every system on time, tracks certifications granted and failures, and estimates output in SRECs and as revenue.
SREC reporting for GATS and WREGIS regions is coming soon. Contact your sales or region manager for details.
SolarEdge API v2 support
SolarEdge's original API (v1) will be retired on November 1.
enSights fully supports the new API v2 and handles the transition for existing integrations automatically.
New connector: Lunar Energy
Lunar Energy home storage systems, which reduce grid dependency by maximizing solar self-consumption, can now be connected and tracked in enSights.ai.
Find it under Data Hub → Connectors → OEM Energy.
04
NORTH AMERICA
What We Heard at Our East and West Coast Roundtables
Sara Marra-Medeiros
Director, Distributed Assets
Over the past month, enSights hosted two roundtables, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, bringing together developers, independent power producers, asset owners, EPCs, O&M providers, third-party asset managers, and finance and policy professionals from across the distributed solar and battery storage lifecycle. The same findings emerged independently in each.
Financing rewards certainty, not upside
Lenders underwrite contracted revenue; merchant and ancillary revenue is treated as incremental, not bankable.
Of the many revenue streams storage is typically pitched on, only three or four tend to hold up under financier scrutiny.
Forecasts alone don't shift how remaining upside is treated; a multi-year operating record does.
Performance reporting functions as a financing input in its own right.
Data problems persist even where software already exists
Lost revenue was concentrated in companies that already had monitoring software, not ones without it.
Common causes: drifting battery readings, unnoticed contract availability shortfalls, and revenue gaps between operators running comparable assets.
In-house monitoring tools, increasingly built with AI, generally take equipment data at face value. State-of-charge readings alone can drift 5 to 15%.
Operators compensate by holding back capacity they don't trust, which caps realized revenue.
Several participants with internal tools in place still reconcile their week manually, from spreadsheets and screenshots.
Accountability degrades across handoffs
As obligations pass from developer to owner to EPC to O&M, field teams typically retain only partial context.
Permit conditions, warranty limits, and basic site duties can end up with no party clearly responsible for them.
Interconnection terms and cycle-based warranties lock in constraints for the asset's full life, years before grid or market conditions are known.
The participants viewed as most credible named their known unknowns rather than claiming precision they didn't have.
Owners are asking for direct data access, not additional reporting layers
No black-box tools.
Direct access to underlying data.
Granularity from cell level to fleet level.
Responsive vendor support.
Recurring complaint: equipment manufacturers withhold data owners need to substantiate warranty claims.
Two structural gaps remain unresolved
Storage revenue comes from avoided costs, which don't appear on an invoice, making the value proposition hard to communicate to legislators, utilities, and real estate buyers in actionable terms.
A 20-year asset requires security planning across its full lifespan; current compliance requirements are a floor, not a sufficient standard.
05
MEET & GREET
Meet the Team
Time at enSights: Joined July 2025
Owns ROW Sales (EU and Middle East) & Customer Success – The Product Experts, responsible to support sales, customer pilots, onboarding and ongoing usage and success/expansion
Favorite Project: Introducing a knowledgebase to find answers and help clients onboard, maximize usage and solve challenges. rid – our new product for CyberSecurity – I worked on applying for BIRD foundation grant, we got it – and now we kick it off – 2 year project.
Fun Fact: I lived in the US (Sunnyvale, CA) for 13 years (1999 to 2011), so all of my kids were born there.
Favorite Hobby: I have been a skipper for 10+ years!
06
EDITORIAL
Is your battery actually hitting the ROI you underwrote?
Edward Wagner
Head of North American Operations
Every battery model makes a promise about lifetime earnings. Once the asset is live, almost nobody checks whether reality is keeping it, because the underwriting case and the monthly revenue statements rarely sit side by side.
They should, because the gap usually starts in the model itself. A stacked revenue case adds capacity, demand response, and reserves as if they're separate income. PJM's own documents say otherwise: the same megawatt counts once across those programs, never summed. A model that adds them overstates returns from day one, even on a perfectly performing battery.
Frequency regulation gets the same treatment. Models often book it as a steady adder, but it's volatile and carries performance penalties, closer to an at-risk stream than a guarantee. Forward capacity prices have a similar issue. PJM only prices capacity about three years out, so a flat revenue line through 2040 assumes certainty the market doesn't actually offer.
None of this means the dispatch optimizer did anything wrong. It means dispatch and underwriting are two different jobs. The optimizer decides when to charge and discharge, hour by hour. A business layer tracks what the battery actually earned, stream by stream, against the case that was promised, so a shortfall can be traced to a price move, a penalty, or a missed window rather than waved off as noise.
The 5CP window in PJM retail territories is a good test case: five summer hours set next year's capacity bill, and nobody knows which five until the season ends. Dispatch gets the battery there. Only the business layer shows whether being there paid off as modeled.
A model is a promise. Keeping score on it is what tells you whether the promise is being kept.
07
UPCOMING EVENTS
Visit enSights at RE+ Vegas
enSights will be at RE+ 2026, November 16–19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Stop by to see the new UI, the AI root-cause analysis tools, and what's next for SREC reporting, or just to talk through what you're seeing in your own portfolio.
Booth: West Hall, Booth 17124
Your job is hard. Solar asset managers have to make money from an asset they don’t control, using a resource they can’t schedule, while being held accountable for every dollar they didn’t make.
With the renewable energy industry evolving faster than ever, we'll continue sharing the trends, technologies, and operational insights shaping the future of solar and storage.
Have a topic you'd like us to explore, or a challenge you're facing? We'd love to hear from you.
Sincerely, The enSights Team
enSights is the trusted Energy Business Management (EBM) platform. Built by a team with 10+ years of global energy expertise, it solves the thorniest industry issue: managing revenue-generating distributed solar and storage, at scale.
Unifying established in-house industry systems, enSights connects, validates, and analyzes operational, contractual, and financial intelligence, creating a single trusted business layer and system of action. Combined, this enables owners and operators to understand what revenue is at risk, why, and what action should be taken to recover it.
For years, enSights' independent validation has enabled financial and operational teams to track and forecast revenue against project contracts, manage potential downtime, and monitor ongoing operational liabilities. Only when working together can these teams unlock confident financial and operational decision-making.
With a global footprint, enSights supports large, distributed portfolios across North America and EMEA. The platform is deployed across more than 50,000 sites, processing hundreds of millions of data points daily. Its unique insight into developing and building assets, combined with developing and building software, turns portfolio performance into clear, accountable action.
For more information, visit ensights.ai
