New Guide Helps Utility Program Planners Make “Solar Plus Storage” Decisions(November 15, 2017) The Community Solar Value Project (CSVP), an effort co-funded by the The Guide is a response to soaring interest in storage as way to more fully utilize rising penetrations of variable renewable energy resources. According to GTM Research, the market for batteries alone is set to grow 11 times over between 2016 and 2022—to about 2.5 GW. Increasingly, utilities are running storage pilot projects, and some of them are finding that a varied approach, for example, using utility-side batteries, plus customer-side batteries or thermal storage, can expand their storage capabilities cost effectively. Interest in storage is rising as a customer option, too, in response to time-of-use rates, high demand charges and interest in customer-side resilience. The CSVP sees storage-enhanced community solar as a useful starting point to utility and customer interests around both solar and storage together, and to increase overall project value. The Guide begins with an overview of broadly defined storage technologies, from pumped hydro and flywheels to batteries, thermal storage, and more. Then it presents a five-step decision process to help utilities match technology choices to the value streams that they would find most available and economical. It also guides utilities to consider the storage decision from the customer’s viewpoint, to assure that any customer-side storage offer would find a ready market. A scoring methodology helps planners compare storage options, in terms of the various integration values presented. The Guide takes into account detailed input from the CSVP’s utility advisory group, comprised of both public power and investor-owned utilities, as well as input from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “We found that utility-side battery storage is the obvious answer, but not the only answer, or even the right answer, depending on what integration problems the utility is trying to address,” explains John Powers, who is contract officer for the CSVP and a Guide co-author. As integration challenges increase, from minute-to-minute resource variability, to a daily mis-match between resource availability and peak load, to the economic challenges of arbitrage, utilities and customers will find ample solutions. “It’s exciting to find so many storage solutions in the toolbox—so long as you learn how to use them,” Powers says. The Guide is available for download from the CSVP website, www.communitysolarvalueproject.com, which highlights solutions in six challenge areas that are frequently encountered by community solar program designers. Those areas include: collaborative processes, strategic solar design, procurement, target marketing, pricing, and solar-plus companion measures. In addition, the solar-plus web page offers links for a deeper exploration of storage, also a Guide to Demand-Response Companion Measures, a modeling study customer-side storage plus community solar applied to resolve circuit-level grid issues, and a webinar discussing storage case studies. CSVP is led by the San Francisco-area energy consulting and analytics firm Extensible Energy, LLC, with support from Cliburn and Associates, Olivine, Inc., Navigant Consulting, and Millennium Energy. Utility participants include the Sacramento (California) Municipal Utility District (SMUD), Public Service of New Mexico, and other utilities nationwide. The project is cosponsored by SunShot, under the Solar Market Pathways program of the U.S. Department of Energy. Contact Jill Cliburn 505-490-3070 or Paul Carlestroem 510-459-0657 |