SunEdison and California-based Advanced Microgrid Systems will develop 50 MW of distributed storage under a 10-year purchase agreement with Southern California Edison, the two companies announced last week.
“Energy storage is the enabling technology here,” AMS CEO and co-founder Susan Kennedy told Greentech. “We’re using energy storage as the mechanism to integrate and unlock the power of the demand side of the meter as a grid resource.”
“What is so unique about Susan’s projects is that they’re a hybrid between a distributed generation behind-the-meter project, and a traditional grid-tied utility-scale project,” said SunEdison’s general manager of advanced solutions, Tim Derrick. “What really drives the value of the project is the capacity contract” with SCE, which provides primary financing for the 10-year endeavour.
“AMS and SunEdison will deploy storage projects at commercial sites across the West Los Angeles Basin as part of SCE’s 2013 Local Capacity Requirement solicitation, intended to substitute generation from the now-shuttered San Onofre nuclear plant,” Pyper writes. “AMS is working with SCE from the outset to deploy storage where the grid is most stressed—such as in solar-rich areas with a steep rise in evening demand. The utility will be able to call on an aggregation of batteries to reduce load at hybrid electric buildings by megawatts at a time.”
