Friday, August 30, 2019

Utah To Be Site Of First Distributed Energy Storage Community

In what looks to be the first rollout of a large scale, distributed energy storage project in the United States, a German company says it plans a massive, solar-powered battery storage system in Harriman, Utah. sonnen, an energy storage developer, says its Soleil Lofts community will combine both on-site solar power generation and battery storage. Sonnen is working with real estate development company the Wasatch Group, and power company Rocky Mountain Power, to create what they call a "Virtual Power Plant" (VPP), which will provide 12.6 megawatt-hours of solar energy storage. The distributed solar batteries will include 600, individual sonnen ecoLinx batteries, which will be managed by Rocky Mountain Power but will be installed as part of a an apartment community called Soleil Lofts. The companies said that the solar energy storage will be used for "demand response", where stored energy is used to smooth out the demand for energy on the power grid. Although solar power is becoming increasingly common on residential and commercial real estate, the use of battery storage in those systems has been just a tiny piece of the market--and such a large, utility-managed distributed energy storage integrated into a community appears to be the very first for the United States.