Advanced Microgrid Solutions’ Hybrid-Electric Building Fleet Goes Live

How a 10-megawatt fleet of bat­ter­ies in Cal­i­for­nia office build­ings fits into the state’s dis­trib­uted ener­gy timeline.

Back in 2015, Cal­i­for­nia real estate devel­op­er Irvine Com­pa­ny announced plans to turn high-rise prop­er­ties into “hybrid-elec­tric build­ings” by equip­ping them with Tes­la bat­ter­ies and then turn­ing them over to ener­gy stor­age project devel­op­er Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions to earn mon­ey serv­ing the pow­er grid.

This week, Irvine Co. and Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions unveiled the results of the project — a fleet of bat­ter­ies at 21 build­ings across South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Each is capa­ble of reduc­ing build­ing peak demand by 25 per­cent, and shav­ing about 10 per­cent from ener­gy expens­es and oper­at­ing costs by up to 10 per­cent. Togeth­er, they’re capa­ble of pro­vid­ing up to 10 megawatts of instan­ta­neous load reduc­tion for up to four hours at a time, to help util­i­ty South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Edi­son bal­ance the grid.

The com­pa­nies also unveiled data from the ear­li­est appli­ca­tions of their tech­nol­o­gy, start­ing with the first oper­a­tional bat­tery-equipped build­ing that came online in Novem­ber. That’s the same month that Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions was due to start deliv­er­ing its first megawatts of capac­i­ty to SCE, under a 2014 con­tract that will even­tu­al­ly scale up to 50 megawatts of capac­i­ty by 2021.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it Green­tech Media.