The introduction of the sector coupling concept has expanded the scope of ESS utilization, resulting in the importance of thermal management of ESS. To ensure the safe use of the lithium-ion batteries that are used in ESS, it is important to use the batteries at the optimal temperature. To examine the utilization of liquid cooling in ESS, numerical study was conducted on the thermal characteristics of 21700 battery modules (16S2P array) during liquid cooling using Novec-649 as insulating fluid. The NTGK model, an MSMD model in ANSYS fluent, was used to investigate thermal characteristics on the battery modules with liquid immersion cooling. The results show that the final temperature of the battery module discharged at 5 C-rate is 68.9℃ using natural convection and 48.3℃ using liquid cooling. However, the temperature difference among cells in the battery module was up to 0.5℃ when using natural convection cooling and 5.8℃ when using liquid cooling, respectively, indicating that the temperature difference among cells was significantly increased when liquid cooling was used. As the mass flow rate increased from 0.01 kg/s to 0.05 kg/s, the average temperature of the battery module decreased from 48.3℃ to 38.4℃, confirming that increasing the mass flow rate of the insulating fluid improves the performance of liquid immersion cooling. Although partial liquid immersion cooling has a high cooling performance compared to natural convection cooling, the temperature difference between modules was up to 8.9℃, indicating that the thermal stress of the battery cells increased.