If only I were a battery, I could be hanging out in Hawaii right now.
The islands have seen a fair number of batteries deployed in recent years, to help solar households self-consume and to smooth large amounts of solar generation on the grid. What they haven’t seen is a thriving commercial storage market like the one California has seen emerge. That hasn’t changed yet, but Californian commercial storage specialist Stem has deployed a pilot network of 29 business-sited battery systems to show how this model might work with Hawaiian utilities.
“What we’re really trying to do with this first set of customers is help to pave the way for the coming industry, which will include multiple players,” said Tad Glauthier, Stem vice president of Hawaii operations, in an interview at the DistribuTech conference in San Diego. “It’s significant in that this is [Hawaii’s] first aggregation of energy storage systems across diverse commercial sites for the utility, that they can see and use in the management of the grid.”
Stem uses its software to operate batteries on behalf of commercial customers, giving them savings on demand charges, while also aggregating across the network to provide grid services like demand response. In Hawaii, that made for a double challenge: educating customers about why they would want a battery, and convincing Hawaiian Electric Company that the batteries can reliably deliver 1 megawatt of capacity to the grid when called upon.
Some of the participants in the pilot are local branches of chains Stem has worked with, like Whole Foods and Albertsons. For some of the locally based customers, including an auto body shop, a sheet metal company and a florist, Stem had to start from scratch pitching why storage would be useful.
Hawaii has the nation’s highest electricity rates, so saving money on electricity is top of mind for consumers there. Most of the companies that participated already had rooftop solar or were in the process of acquiring it. Often, though, “They don’t think about the peak; they think about using less,” said Tad Glauthier, Stem’s vice president of Hawaii operations.
The business case for commercial demand management isn’t as strong in Hawaii as it is in a place like California, because the demand charge there is smaller — $11.69 per kilowatt for small commercial customers in Honolulu. The revenue stream for business-sited batteries providing grid services didn’t exist either, because HECO didn’t have a model for it.
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