AMS CEO: Energy storage can reach scale without subsidies

Private investment will help scale storage, says Advanced Microgrid Solutions CEO Susan Kennedy

It is often said that an ener­gy stor­age project needs more than one stream of rev­enue to suc­ceed and often reg­u­la­to­ry bar­ri­ers are seen as the biggest imped­i­ment to reach­ing that goal.

Indi­anapo­lis Pow­er & Light’s 20 MW, 20 MWh Hard­ing Street stor­age facil­i­ty that entered ser­vice in May is one exam­ple. It pro­vides grid ser­vices for IPL, but mar­ket rules in the Mid­con­ti­nent ISO are not con­ducive to bat­tery stor­age plants, so IPL has peti­tioned the Fed­er­al Ener­gy Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion to find that MISO’s rules are dis­crim­i­na­to­ry and need to be revised.

How­ev­er, some stor­age com­pa­nies have built a dual rev­enue stream into their busi­ness mod­el. They see the mar­ket for ener­gy stor­age not as a flow of ser­vices from on one side of the meter to the oth­er, but as more of a two-way street serv­ing cus­tomers on both sides of the meter.

A big part of Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions’ busi­ness, for instance, involves installing behind-the-meter ener­gy stor­age sys­tems, but as CEO Susan Kennedy said, “We are a util­i­ty-fac­ing company.”

That was evi­dent in the company’s July 2015 announce­ment of a deal to deliv­er 50 MW of ener­gy stor­age for South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Edi­son. Under the deal, SCE will pur­chase capac­i­ty from the stor­age sys­tems under a 10-year con­tract, and expects to use the elec­tric­i­ty stored in AMS’ hybrid-elec­tric build­ings to off­set the pow­er once pro­duced by the decom­mis­sioned San Onofre nuclear pow­er plant and oth­er soon-to-be retired gas-fired plants.

But the stor­age sys­tem to pro­vide the util­i­ty those ser­vices will reside on the cus­tomer side of the meter in what AMS calls hybrid elec­tric build­ings. There, a com­bi­na­tion of ener­gy stor­age tech­nol­o­gy and ana­lyt­i­cal soft­ware will enable the build­ing own­ers to improve ener­gy effi­cien­cy, low­er ener­gy bills and reduce green­house gas emissions.

In Novem­ber, AMS announced a deal with Invesco Real Estate to bring its hybrid build­ing tech­nol­o­gy to the Invesco’s South­ern Cal­i­for­nia real estate port­fo­lio while ana­lyz­ing the real estate fir­m’s entire U.S. port­fo­lio for fur­ther deployments.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it DUtil­i­ty­DIVE.