SMT Energy’s 160 MW/320 MWh Houston IV battery moved from energization on June 1 to market participation on July 13, six weeks later. Houston IV achieved the fastest commissioning timeline in FlexGen and SMT’s history, said Jason Rislov, senior vice president of operations at US-based FlexGen, which supplied the site’s energy management software and led commissioning.
The project uses 74 Trina Storage Elementa 2 units with lithium iron phosphate cells and 37 Sungrow SC5000-UD-MV-US-P3 power converters. Irby Construction Co., a Quanta Services subsidiary, was the engineering, procurement, and construction contractor.
Rislov said FlexGen measures its work from mechanical completion to the owner’s first day of market participation, covering cold, warm, and hot commissioning with the equipment suppliers, followed by grid qualification with ERCOT.
He said the 25-week benchmark for that full process reflects industry averages and FlexGen’s own historical projects, including earlier work with SMT. Field commissioning alone typically takes about 12 weeks, he said, and Houston IV, FlexGen’s 14th or 15th project with SMT, compressed that to six.
Lab first
Rislov said the gains come from the latest version of HybridOS, FlexGen’s energy management platform, which draws on 15 years of experience and more than 25 GWh of projects. “We’ve seen every problem and we’ve solved every problem, frankly,” he said.
FlexGen builds digital twins and maps Modbus communications while hardware is still in transit, then tests controls against an emulator at its lab in Durham, North Carolina, to produce a field commissioning test plan for the specific system. Rislov said that means faults crews would otherwise troubleshoot on site surface in a controlled setting.
In the field, FlexGen runs point-to-point and telemetry checks as automated scripts. Rislov said grid qualification with ERCOT, which can involve weeks of back-and-forth, took a few days on Houston IV, and he credited the grid operator’s familiarity with FlexGen’s testing process. FlexGen said its market qualification test kits also produce the paperwork needed for approval.
FlexGen’s 24/7 remote operations center continued commissioning after field crews left each day. Rislov credited SMT for letting FlexGen start work alongside Irby before mechanical completion. “You don’t get that all the time,” he said.
Asked whether faster commissioning meant less testing, Rislov said the reverse was true. “Yeah, I would actually argue that automating it in the way that we do is actually safer, because, again, you’re taking a lot of the process from the field where things can happen in the field,” he said.
Rislov explained that the approach means more testing overall, drawing on more than 70 equipment configurations FlexGen has worked with.
He added that Houston IV repeats results FlexGen has achieved with an undisclosed owner in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator market.
Revenue pressure
Houston IV came online as ERCOT battery revenues fell. Battery revenues across ERCOT averaged $1.67/kW per month in May and hit a record low of $1.11/kW per month in June before recovering to $1.42/kW per month in July, according to analytics firm Modo Energy’s July and September benchmarks. ERCOT had 14.96 GW/24.6 GWh of operational battery storage at the end of the first quarter, said London-based Modo.
Rislov said FlexGen is not SMT’s qualified scheduling entity and has no visibility into the project’s earnings, but that bringing the battery online in the first half of the summer rather than at its end still mattered for the Texas grid. He said the main bottleneck remains demand growth.
“So I think the biggest bottleneck is still just getting systems online fast and reliably,” said Rislov.
FlexGen acquired Powin’s intellectual property, software, and spare parts inventory for $36 million in August 2025 through Powin’s Chapter 11 proceedings in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey. On Sept. 17, it named Hugh Scott, previously chief technology officer, as chief operating officer.
Rislov said the Powin portfolio broadened the equipment data feeding HybridOS, and that putting technology and operations under Scott is meant to bring field lessons into software development earlier.
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