Renovating Solar Plants

Large-scale renewable energy storage retrofitted existing solar plants. At peak solar times, the solar plant produces about 20 megawatts more than it can export under its interconnection arrangement.

The AC-coupled battery captures some of renewable energy that would’ve been wasted. This project took place because of its eligibility for the federal Investment Tax Credit, use of existing site and clean energy arbitrage opportunities.

Decrease Fuel Consumption

This front-of-the-meter battery project is led by Navy veteran Josh Prueher. After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, Prueher created the company to give distributed energy systems for deployment in battlefield environments.

The business also worked on storage-backed microgrids to decrease fuel consumption. It deployed its first grid-tied storage with a DC-coupled solar-plus-storage system in Puerto Rico. Prueher assembled a 525-megawatt-hour pipeline for solar-paired storage, mostly retrofits on existing utility-scale plants.

“Adding storage to existing solar sites, particularly DC-coupled, is the lowest-cost way to deliver scaled storage attributes for their system,” he said. DC-coupled gives clean energy from solar modules and batteries through the same power conversion. Doing so saves on equipment costs and round-trip efficiency.

Storage Retrofits

A growing number of utilities have been looking for additional flexible services without needing more renewable generation. Storage retrofits takes care of this. The firm takes existing solar generation and retrofit piggybacks on work done to plan the site for a power plant. This method is more economical to include storage capacity than it would be to add a new site.

The Texas regulatory sector has been difficult for storage, noted Ravi Manghani, energy storage director at GTM Research. At the same time, grid operator ERCOT lacks capacity market, so storage can’t look into a value stream. “The Public Utility Commission of Texas has finally indicated interest in addressing the broader policy questions on treatment of storage, so there may be a thawing of policies in the coming years,” Manghani said.

The increase of Texas solar contributes to the urgency to the storage policy concerns. ERCOT has 27.8 gigawatts of solar capacity. As solar energy increases, ancillary services will gain in value that creates new market opportunities for storage. “Folks that understand not just how it can operate today, but over the life of the project, they have the vision to know that the regulatory structure is going to change,” Prueher said.

Prueher draws battle-tested control system and operational data to design systems with 20-year lives. The controls shifting to different use cases automatically. He’s scaling project revenue and a $25.5 million Series A that includes investments from GE and Caterpillar. If you’d like more information, click here.

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