Austin Energy is looking holistically at how storage can serve customers and the grid across the city of Austin, Texas.
The Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar Photovoltaics (SHINES) program is harnessing utility-scale storage, distributed storage, smart inverters and data to help the local grid integrate more solar power.
How is it going since it launched earlier in the year?
We sit down with Jackie Sargent, the general manager of Austin Energy, ahead of her participation in Energy Storage Summit (San Francisco, December 11-12) to discuss early lessons from the first phase of the program.
“The value of experiencing these things firsthand cannot be overstated,” explained Sargent.
Earlier this year, the project was recognized by GTM as one of the winners of the 2018 Grid Edge Innovation Awards.
GTM: Can you reflect on learnings so far from the SHINES program?
Jackie Sargent: This project presents an opportunity to study battery storage at three levels along the utility value chain: grid-scale, commercial-scale and residential-scale. Though Austin SHINES is still in the early stages, we’ve already learned a lot about the interconnection process of putting battery storage on the distribution system. From protection system coordination for inverter-based resources to selecting the right interconnection transformer windings, and from custom battery container design to environmental controls, the value of experiencing these things firsthand cannot be overstated.
Regarding behind-the-meter (BTM) energy storage, it’s really about understanding customer value propositions. We have to ask ourselves what are the reasons a customer would want to install storage on their own and how will the proliferation of two-way resources at the grid edge impact distribution feeders. Which issues are hyper-local and which have broader grid implications? We’re eager to answer these questions as we move into future phases of the project.
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