Elysia Boosts Battery Life by 30% for a More Energized World

Elysia wants to help lower emissions by helping electrify the world. It’s part of Fortescue, the technology, energy, and metals group focused on accelerating industrial decarbonisation of industry, rapidly, profitably and globally. Fortescue’s green technology and engineering services arm, Fortescue Zero, creates the solutions required to enable a zero emissions future, operating across sectors such as automotive, motorsports, aerospace, defense, rail, off-highway, and energy. It collaborates closely with customers and partners to address key engineering challenges in decarbonisation, including helping decarbonise Fortescue’s iron ore operations by 2030. 

Elysia combines advanced data science and electrochemical research to bring battery intelligence to Fortescue’s own growing fleet of electric mining vehicles as well as manufacturers and owners of battery systems in the automotive and stationary storage markets. The integration of Elysia battery intelligence technology in Fortescue’s fully electric T 264 mining haul truck, jointly developed with Liebherr, is pivotal in enhancing operational efficiency. By optimising battery performance, extending battery lifespan, and enabling real-time data-driven monitoring, the technology plays a critical role in advancing sustainable, cost-effective mining operations, setting a new standard for the future of zero emission heavy industry equipment.

Data is key to delivering on Elysia’s promise: by making the most of data generated by today’s vehicles, battery users and developers can enhance performance and lifespan — ultimately contributing to building a more sustainable planet. As James Wallace, Elysia’s Head of Product, explains: “Data is critical to our thesis. By better using the data generated by connected cars, we can go beyond the limitations of test data and get a real-world understanding of batteries that we can use to optimize performance, ensure safety, and maximize lifespan. We’ve shown that by applying Elysia to our own projects we can enhance battery lifespan by up to 30 percent.”

But when your business model relies on ingesting data from different organizations and all kinds of battery types, finding infrastructure that can keep up is no easy feat. “We knew early on that data volume would pose a challenge for our infrastructure,” says Wallace. “But with few standards across battery diagnostics and different cleaning pipelines in place across our customers, data cleansing and standardization were also significant hurdles.”

Even with a strong technical team behind him, Elysia’s Principal Data Engineer, Pezhman Zarabadi quickly saw how these challenges could escalate. “When you work with organizations like Jaguar Land Rover, there’s no way to start small.” Elysia’s data platform needed to offer  seamless scalability without incurring high ingress and egress charges — despite the huge data volume. And it needed to deliver comprehensive data security from end to end.

The team also wanted to avoid burdening data scientists with an overly complex technology stack. “We tried other tools, but quickly found that the engineering overhead was significant,” recalls Matt Clarke, principal data scientist at Elysia. “To meet the high cybersecurity standards automotive companies expect, you need solutions that everyone can rely on.”

Elysia’s data team found one data platform that met all its needs: Snowflake. 

In just a short period of time, Elysia was up and running in Snowflake, creating a single platform for all battery data ingress, storage and transformation. “The AI Data Cloud is our main data solution and the landing zone for everything that enters our environment,” says Wallace. That includes tens of billions of diagnostic data points and five gigawatt hours of battery storage information all handled seamlessly at scale. Wallace’s team also uses Snowflake to engineer pipelines, cleanse data and even share data back to customers.

Outside day-to-day data operations, Snowflake helps the team experiment with new products, models and transformations. “With tools like Zero Copy Cloning, we can roll out and test new ideas quickly,” explains Zarabadi. “If we’re adding new battery variables to our dataset, our analysts can test them in Snowflake as if it’s in production. This would be very hard to do if we homebrewed our own solution.” This means Elysia is able to incorporate new metrics, visualizations and features faster, so customers can get even more transparency into their battery systems.

With Snowflake, Elysia can manage large, diverse datasets securely at scale and with minimal overheads. It’s also easy for teams to meet the high data hygiene and security standards Elysia’s customers expect. “If we used other tools or built our own solutions, we’d risk having copies of the same data in different locations,” says Zarabadi. Having a single source of truth makes it easier to track data provenance, which is vital for insights like those Elysia provides. “People make business-critical decisions based on our data,” adds Clarke. “Being able to go back and show a complete data lineage has been crucial for our customers.”

On the security side, Snowflake also has Elysia covered. “The AI Data Cloud’s Time Travel and failsafe features are huge for ensuring data resilience and backup policies across Elysia,” says Zarabadi. And having recently achieved ISO 27001 certification, Elysia can easily demonstrate security across the whole data lifecycle with a secure, unified platform like Snowflake.

Onboarding customers onto Snowflake has been a smooth process, Wallace says. “Snowflake always plays well with our customers’ tooling, whatever it may be,” he adds. “With tools like Snowpark, it doesn’t matter what cloud platforms they use either.” Elysia can quickly onboard customers, protect their data at all stages and scale with their needs (and different battery types) — whether it’s for a fleet of 100 or 100,000 vehicles.

Elysia’s battery intelligence ultimately leads to better, lower cost batteries for businesses and consumers in both the automotive and stationary storage markets. “With our insights, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can unlock battery performance, including faster charge times, longer ranges and improved battery lifetime,” says Wallace.

Plus, if manufacturers understand battery degradation and performance intimately, they won’t need to use oversized batteries. Insurance can be cheaper if those involved in the electric vehicle space can better understand how to mitigate product risks — opening the door to a more sustainable future.  

Elysia has already made great strides in optimizing data ingress, transformation and sharing. But it’s just getting started. Next up? Integrating other data sets. “If we combine our insights with supply chain and manufacturing data, we could optimize battery designs in a much tighter loop — taking the pace of change from years down to months,” says Wallace. The Elysia team is also exploring how it can monitor and update battery parameters for individual batteries to improve performance of vehicles in the field.

To achieve these goals, Elysia will need new ways to integrate with its customers and their data, and Snowflake will play a vital role. The team is exploring Snowflake’s collaboration tools and Snowflake Native Apps to make it easier for customers to share data with Elysia.

“Ultimately, data is key to unlocking battery performance and ensuring safety,” says Wallace. “There are plenty of academic models that help with this. Our job is to translate those into real-world business value, and Snowflake is helping us bridge that gap.”