The manuscript describes a method to embed into a battery energy storage system (BESS) control strategy the performance degradation associated with the battery operation. In particular, the proposed method aims at minimizing the degra- dation of the BESS electrochemical cells. A load leveling strategy is described as a case study and the ageing effects associated with the battery current extraction are embedded as constraints into the optimization problem. The main contributions of the work, compared to the existing literature are: i) the degradation process is formulated as a weighted energy throughput, thus taking into account the C-rate effect on the degradation phenomena; ii) the performance of the proposed control strategy has been applied to a large scale lithium-titanate BESS of 280 kWh interfaced to a 20 kV active distribution network.