Customer Story

Octave

Octave is a cleantech company based in Belgium that gives electric vehicle (EVs) batteries a second life. They develop energy storage systems by repurposing used lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries and transforming them into smart, sustainable assets to store excess wind and solar energy.

Octave’s sustainable energy storage system allows customers to increase their self-consumption and cope with the intermittency of renewable energy sources. It also enables customers to participate actively in the energy markets, becoming more independent from energy suppliers, fossil fuels, and grid operators.

Octave distinguishes itself from traditional battery suppliers by leveraging the plethora of data and measurements from the battery system and building up an extensive history of each battery cell. They handle large streams of battery measurements with clear time-series characteristics: each data point is composed of a timestamp and a value. These data are collected from the battery systems (their IoT edge devices) and sent back to their cloud for further analysis.

In the early days, Octave used AWS Timestream, which at first seemed a natural choice to handle their time-series data since their cloud infrastructure was entirely built in AWS. However, they quickly realized they would need a more widely used, mature, and scalable database solution if they ever wanted to scale their operations and deploy several dozen or hundred second-life battery systems in the field.

After some research, the Octave team moved to Timescale and found Timescale's compression ratio to be absolutely phenomenal. They're currently at a compression ratio of over 26, drastically reducing the disk space required to store all their data. Additionally, Timescale's continuous aggregates allow for speedy queries on large historical data on client-facing applications.