Exceptional achievement and leadership earns IEEE PES Technical Committee Working Group Recognition Award
A newly published guide on battery management systems was recognized this month for its quality and its creators’ leadership. The standard, known as IEEE Std 2686™-2024, provides recommended practices to safely and effectively operate battery management systems in energy storage applications. The new standard will help operators and developers make battery systems more reliable, secure, and affordable, lowering barriers to their widespread deployment. In doing so, the standard helps lower energy prices and increase the resilience of the electrical grid.
A 32-member working group, chaired by Sandia researcher David Rosewater, was recognized in January with an IEEE PES Technical Committee Working Group Recognition Award for developing the standard. The award is granted by vote from the IEEE Energy Storage and Stationary Battery committee, a group of professionals from across the stationary battery and energy storage industry. The award cites the team’s exceptional achievement and leadership.
Research and staff at Sandia National Laboratories contributed to the standard’s development, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.
Why Standards
Standards like this one are used by companies, regulators, and officials to enable consistency, compatibility, and safety — supporting the creation and expansion of new technologies and protecting health and public safety. Organizations, companies and agencies can contribute to and use published standards rather than developing or maintaining their own, which helps lower industry-wide costs to bring new technology to market. Standards published by IEEE are widely used around the world.
Because national laboratories possess unique instruments and facilities, they are often called upon to help supply scientific and technical information used by standard-setting committees.
Persistence pays off
Since its formation in 2018, the working group has built consensus across stakeholder groups, a group of nearly two hundred participants and interested parties from various industry sectors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team moved to online-only meetings and completed an initial draft. By the spring of 2022, the standard was ready for review and editing, followed by working group balloting to confirm it could proceed to IEEE Standards Association balloting and publication. It passed balloting in 2024 and became a formally published standard in February 2025. The recent award suggests that the time and effort paid off, producing a valuable resource for industry.
“This is a milestone in the field that will have a large impact on how battery management systems are designed and configured from here into the future,” said Rosewater. “Having led the IEEE working group since 2018, I’m so proud of the document we produced together.”
Continuous Improvement
The new standard establishes a recommended practice for the design and configuration of battery management systems. But as technology matures, so do standards. “This standard places a good flag in the ground for this stage of the technology,” Rosewater said, “Now, we are working to keep up with the rapid developments in the field.” Although the standard was only published last year, the working group has reopened the standard and is currently working on the next revision.
About the Standard
Energy Storage safety standards help provide the information to safely and effectively build, maintain, and operate grid energy storage systems. Battery management systems monitor and control the rechargeable batteries that make up a grid-scale energy storage system. This includes monitoring battery state of health, which makes them particularly important for a battery system’s safety and reliability. The Recommended Practice supplies a list of best practices for the design and integration of battery management systems that protect the safety and longevity of batteries in energy storage applications. Access IEEE Standard 2686-2024 on the IEEE website.