Data Centre Review Trend Report: From backup to backbone - why battery strategy is changing in 2026
Featuring insights from ACCURE Director of Battery Intelligence, Darya Rüwald
Data centres have always been built on resilience. In 2026, that is getting harder to guarantee. AI is driving up power demand and changing how that demand behaves, while grid access grows more constrained. Data Centre Review's latest trend report, "From Backup to Backbone," examines what that means for battery strategy: why batteries are moving from passive backup to strategic infrastructure, and why monitoring, safety, and service life now shape the decisions operators make.
The report features insights from ACCURE's Darya Rüwald, Director of Battery Intelligence. Her point cuts to why visibility matters: state of charge is not a fixed number. It shifts with the power rate a battery is running at, and a basic battery-management system rarely accounts for it. A reading taken at rest can look very different from the true state of charge when a battery is called on to deliver full backup power.
Read the full report at Data Centre Review.
ACCURE helps companies reduce risk, improve performance, and maximize the business value of battery energy storage. Our predictive analytics solution simplifies the complexity of battery data to make batteries safer, more reliable, and more sustainable. By combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence with deep expert knowledge of batteries, we bring a new level of clarity to energy storage. Today, we support customers worldwide, helping optimize the performance and safety of their battery systems.
ACCURE Battery Intelligence pairs an award-winning battery analytics platform with hands-on performance engineering for grid-scale battery storage. The platform combines artificial intelligence with physics-based battery models to give owners and operators an independent, cell-level view of their assets, and ACCURE's performance engineers work alongside clients to act on it: capturing the revenue their assets were built to deliver, lowering operating costs and mitigating risk. Founded by battery researchers from RWTH Aachen University, ACCURE is the assurance and outperformance layer for grid-scale BESS, supporting more than 24 GWh of capacity worldwide. We work with battery owners and operators, and the insurers and financial institutions that back them, across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America.
