Commercial energy storage ‘pioneer’ Stem Inc and NEC have announced a master supply agreement and wide-ranging partnership that will see the latter’s equipment and solutions used in solar-plus-storage projects in Stem’s pipeline.
NEC’s Roger Lin and Stem Alan Russo talked to Andy Colthorpe about the dynamics of that deal and why the two entities: one in the behind-the-meter, storage-as-a-service industry delivering projects on a business model of sharing revenues and electricity costs avoided with the customer and the other, known for its work on larger projects connected to the utility side of the meter, came together to pool their capabilities and ambitions.
Energy-Storage.news: NEC has done solar-plus-storage projects already and so has Stem Inc, but both companies are perhaps better known for their standalone energy storage projects. Presumably you have both observed a broadening of the business case for adding energy storage to solar that makes this new partnership a timely one?
Alan Russo, Stem: We’ve seen increasingly that the market was moving towards solar that had storage. That really comes from behind-the-meter customer-sited stuff and the front-of-the-meter, sort of, ‘virtual net-metered’ projects which are owned by independent power producers (IPPs). We recognised that developers were struggling with that question: ‘what do I do with a battery?’
That is the area that the industry is trying to figure out as fast as possible because of regulatory incentive structures that are incentivising the deployment of storage for grid-scale applications.
Roger Lin, NEC: Solar-and-storage is obviously a big story nowadays. The fundamentals have always been the same: that the sun comes up and goes down, you have clouds, you can’t always consume that electricity being generated at exactly those times. Putting storage with solar just makes sense, it’s very simple.
What’s changed is the policy and business models that have been driving that. There have been localised pockets of advances in solar-storage, so there’s the advent of the solar-storage PPA that has been out there for at least a year and a half now, with maybe half a dozen different variants on that, all valuing the addition of storage to solar, not just for the sake of storage but for the sake of control, for the sake of dispatchability, to deliver the power when you need the power. Those things didn’t exist before.
Recent Comments