Vantara Stand-Alone Power Systems

Vantara is built to order, with a typical lead time of 12 to 16 weeks, commencing once you approve the design documentation. Vantara and its major componentry are not held in stock.

Two things genuinely compress a SAPS programme schedule, and neither is chasing the supplier. The first is returning the design approval quickly. That is the item most often sitting idle. The second is standardising the configuration across a multi-site programme, which removes a design and approval cycle per site. This is the main reason Vantara Rapid exists.

If you have a fixed compliance, seasonal or shutdown date, tell us at enquiry rather than at order. There are usually options, but they are options at the front of the process, not the back.

Vantara’s battery modules are LiFePO₄ and certified to IEC 62619, the international safety standard for lithium cells and batteries in industrial applications, whose current edition includes a mandatory thermal propagation test, plus UN 38.3 for transport and CE. Inverters are certified to EN-IEC 62477-1 and EN-IEC 62109-1 and -2, with EMC to EN-IEC 61000-6-1 through -6-4. The enclosure is IP55, fire-resistant twin-walled construction, rated −30 °C to +60 °C, with door alarms, temperature sensing and a padlockable lock.

The chemistry choice is deliberate and worth understanding. LiFePO₄ is the most thermally stable lithium chemistry in commercial use, materially different from the NMC and NCA chemistries used in electric vehicles and consumer devices, which are the batteries people have usually seen in a news report. That is a real difference, not a marketing one.

It is not however, a claim that lithium cannot fail. Any energy storage system requires correct installation, charge control, thermal management and protection, and the relevant Australian requirements, AS/NZS 5139 where in scope, AS 3011 and AS 2676 where not plus the fire-engineering requirements applying to the building or enclosure, need to be met on their own terms. Regulatory positions on lithium battery storage in occupied buildings are evolving. Any project involving lithium in an occupied building should assume heightened scrutiny from fire safety authorities. Check the local authority position during design, not after installation

Vantara delivers 30 kVA of continuous inverter output per unit at 25 °C, standard and configurations available up to 90 kVA continuous. AC output is 230/240 V with total harmonic distortion under 2% and maximum efficiency of 96%.

Surge capability is usually the deciding specification, not continuous rating, and it is where most off-grid systems fail in service. Inductive loads, bore pumps, irrigation, compressors, workshop machinery, refrigeration, draw three to six times their running current at start. 

Vantara’s connection capability:

That 200 A five-second surge is what lets a Vantara start a pump without oversizing the whole system to cover a two-second event. The alternative, specifying a system twice as large as the continuous load requires, is how off-grid projects end up with capital cost that kills the business case.

Tell us at design stage what the largest single motor on site is and whether it has soft-start. During initial system start-up, sequence the load bring-up in steps rather than applying all loads at once. This manages inrush current and protects the system from unnecessary stress at commissioning.

Three mechanisms handle it, in order.

Storage. 55 kWh of usable lithium capacity as standard, expandable in 25 kWh increments, at up to 95% depth of discharge, so the nameplate capacity is very nearly all available, rather than half of it as with a lead-acid design.

Generator backup. Where fitted, the generator starts automatically on low state of charge and stops once the battery is recharged, without site attendance. The battery management system holds the inverter’s shutdown threshold well above zero, so the system recovers rather than collapsing.

Design margin. This is the part that actually decides the outcome, and it happens before anything is installed. AS/NZS 4509.2 guides autonomy at 2 days with automatic generator control, 2–3 days with manual control, and 4–5 days for a system with no generation backup, but the number that governs is the maximum contiguous run of low-solar days at your specific site, in the worst month, at end-of-life battery capacity rather than nameplate.

Any supplier who answers “how many cloudy days?” without asking for your location and load profile is guessing. Ask what solar resource dataset they used and what year of degradation they modelled.

Yes, Vantara is modular by design, and expansion is a defined product step rather than a redesign. Three upgrade paths:

• Energy Store Upgrade, 25 kWh packages of five 5 kWh lithium modules
• Additional Solar, 12.9 kWp ground-mount arrays with fencing
• High Demand Kit, 15 kVA of additional inverter capacity plus 30 kWh of storage

Inverters, battery modules and chargers are hot-swappable, so capacity can be added without taking the site off supply.

The practical value of this shows up in two situations. The first is load growth you did not forecast, a customer adds a shed, a comms site adds equipment, a pump is upsized. The second, and more valuable for a network, is evidence-based augmentation planning: because the energy management system logs generation, load and state-of-charge history, the decision to add capacity is made from measured data rather than from a complaint. Over a fleet, that is the difference between augmenting the sites that need it and augmenting all of them.

The architecture also accommodates future additions such as EV charging, which is worth knowing if the site is a depot, a community facility or a remote workshop.

Solar generation

Battery storage

Enclosure and environment

It depends on the delivery model, and the distinction matters for both regulatory and commercial reasons.

Under a distributor-led model, the DNSP owns, installs, operates and maintains the SAPS as a network asset, and the customer continues to be supplied and billed as a network customer. Essential Energy, for example, installs, owns, maintains and operates its SAPS at no additional charge to eligible customers. Eligibility is typically limited to existing connections with an established retail account, not greenfield sites or new developments.

Under a customer-owned model, which is how most telecommunications, mining, rail and water SAPS are procured, the asset owner owns the system and maintains it directly or under a service agreement.

Valen supplies into both. What changes between them is not the hardware but the documentation, the monitoring architecture and the maintenance regime, because a network asset carries obligations a private asset does not.

Yes, and the framework is now reasonably settled after several years of reform. The key elements:

• The AEMC’s distributor-led SAPS rules establish how a DNSP may replace a network connection with a stand-alone system while the customer retains the protections of a network customer.
• The AER publishes guidance on the interaction between its ring-fencing guideline and distributor-led SAPS, and maintains the instruments applying to regulated SAPS.
• AEMO maintains market frameworks including the Market Stand Alone Power System Resource Provider (MSRP) registration category for larger systems.

On the technical side, the design references most commonly applied are:

• AS/NZS 4509.1 and 4509.2 for stand-alone power system safety, installation and design
• AS/NZS 5033 for the PV array
• AS/NZS 3000 as the base wiring standard
• AS/NZS 5139 for battery system safety, where the installation falls within its scope That last qualification is important and widely misunderstood, see the next question.

Sometimes, and the exclusions are the part most people get wrong. AS/NZS 5139:2019 applies to battery systems used with power conversion equipment between 12 V and 1500 V DC with a capacity of at least 1 kWh and no more than 200 kWh. It expressly excludes:

• telecommunications applications
• uninterruptible power systems complying with AS 62040
• premises with critical power continuity requirements, such as acute care hospitals
• electric vehicles, portable equipment and transportable structures

So a 55 kWh SAPS serving a rural property is generally in scope. A battery bank at a telecommunications site is not. A UPS battery in a data centre is not. Where 5139 does not apply, the standards that do are different, AS 3011 for secondary batteries installed in buildings, AS 2676 for their installation, maintenance and testing, AS 4044:2024 for the charger, and AS 60896.22:2023 for valve-regulated lead-acid product requirements.

Amendment 1 (2025) added material worth knowing if you are designing an enclosure or a room: a formal “battery room” definition requiring a dedicated room, a garage or storeroom does not qualify, new clearance figures including 600 mm at the front and 900 mm above in restricted locations, and a new appendix for calculating cell short-circuit current.

We answer this in detail because getting it wrong in either direction is expensive: applying 5139 where it does not belong adds cost and delay, and missing it where it does apply fails inspection.

Vantara is supplied as a turnkey installation including the ground-mounted solar array on engineered frames, concrete footings, and secure fencing around the array to a standard SAPS design. The standard array foundation treatment is weed mat and compacted gravel rather than a full concrete pad, which materially reduces civil cost and time.

Site works typically supplied by others:

• Site access suitable for delivery and lifting
• Any required clearing
• The electrical connection to the customer’s switchboard

For remote locations, note that Vantara’s component design allows delivery by light vehicle or helicopter where road access is limited, worth raising early in the design conversation if that applies to your site.

We normally supply and install Vantara as a complete package, so the site preparation scope is confirmed as part of the design rather than left as an unquantified variation.

Yes. Vantara is supplied with the Vonnect energy management system, which provides a single dashboard across generation, storage, inverters, HVAC, UPS, environmental sensors, door alarms, customer breakers and the SAPS bypass switch, with 34 digital and analogue input and output points, spare capacity on both, and configurable read/write registers.

Three integration characteristics that matter to a network operator:

It is server-agnostic and sits inside your network. Vonnect is designed to integrate with a secure network with no link to the outside world, which is the architecture DNSP cyber security requirements generally demand. Community and network-connected battery deployments attract genuine and appropriate scrutiny here, and an energy management system that requires an outbound internet connection to function is often the reason a project stalls at security review.

It has very low parasitic draw. Communications overhead is 0.007 kWh, the monitoring does not meaningfully consume the energy it is monitoring.

It scales to a fleet. Single-login control across multiple sites, with protocol drivers that can be deployed without disrupting operation.

Confirm your required protocol at design stage rather than at commissioning. It is a configuration item, but it is not a field one.

Vonnect is Valen’s energy management and remote monitoring platform. Support is available across four service levels, so you can match the level of oversight to the criticality of the asset:

A one-off integration fee covers setup, communications configuration, dashboard configuration and secure onboarding. Pricing for integration and ongoing service levels is available on application, it depends on fleet size, protocol requirements and the level of active monitoring specified.

Which level is right usually comes down to one question: if this asset failed silently at 2am, what would that cost? For a single site with a tolerant load, Level 1 is appropriate. For a network asset with a reliability obligation, Level 3 exists because the alternative is finding out from the customer.