China Energy Storage: The CEO of U.S. virtual power plant provider Swell Energy recently said that New York utility ConEdison has long recognized the value that aggregated home battery systems can provide with solar packages.
Swell Energy's SulemanKhan was one of a handful of employees at TeslaEnergy in 2015. He was part of the TeslaPowerwall residential energy storage product launch team and now leads a company that leverages energy storage systems, including the Powerwall, by combining their power and energy and aggregating them into virtual power plants.
Under contract, Swell Energy currently has agreements for 300 MWh of virtual power plants in areas such as Hawaii and California and has raised $450 million in project financing, which Khan said is equivalent to battery storage capacity for about 14,000 homes. The company's business model is essentially based on selling home battery storage systems with or without solar power to homeowners at a discount, after signing local capacity contracts with utilities to help them reduce the total load in a given area, which is what he calls "the value of customer-side storage.
SwellEnergy paid for some of the upfront costs of these solar+battery storage systems in a project hosted by utility ConEdison.
Since the release of the customer-facing software, Khan says, the response to the first-come, first-served VPP offer has been "amazing. At the same time, ConEdison welcomes the use of clean energy to solve the problems it faces.
Con Edison's Newtown Substation in Queens is facing load growth and is approaching the limits of its current capacity due to the growing demand for electricity in the area. Instead of building expensive transmission infrastructure, the company is considering whether deploying 500kW of energy storage capacity could be an alternative, potentially alleviating the need for capital expenditures on grid equipment, or at least delaying it for a while.
Khan said the project is "super valuable from the standpoint of what it provides for ConEdison," and SwellEnergy has been able to leverage that by providing the company with the opportunity to retrofit battery storage equipment to existing home solar systems. This transforms a distributed solar asset into one that can be dispatched, he said.
While the 10-year contract is quite small compared to some of Swell's other projects (notably the 80 MW VPP contract in Hawaii), the company's CEO believes that if successful, this "very novel project" could open the door to many more like it. New York's policy goal is to deploy 1.5GW by 2025 and 3GW of energy storage by 2030 to achieve 100% renewable electricity by 2040, with some of the storage needed for customer-side storage. To date, ConEdison itself has been ordered to procure or oversee 300MW of 4-hour energy storage in its service territory. It has deployed some distributed energy storage near the new VPP area through the Brooklyn-QueensDemand Management Program, which also includes the deployment of local microgrid systems over the past five or six years.
Swell Energy's VPP model also extends to grid services, Khan said, adding that Con Edison has been forward-thinking about the additional revenue streams and additional services that batteries can provide. If possible, the project could also participate in the wholesale power market. swell Energy and Con Edison have embarked on a new partnership in which Con Edison secures customers for Swell Energy, and Swell Energy provides those customers with photovoltaic storage systems and is responsible for the development and operation of the entire VPP, which can help Con Edison can help Con Edison realize the value of grid services for the benefit of all three parties.
If you have interests in energy storage batteries, please feel free to contact info@manlybattery.com, thank you.
