The municipal utility in Austin, Texas is trying to figure out how much money can be saved when solar and storage talk to each other.
Austin Energy will install its first large-scale batteries this year to join a growing fleet of solar generation, both central and distributed. With funding from the Department of Energy, the utility is syncing up the efforts around an integrated control system, to quantify the value added by coordinating the dispersed assets.
That will be more than an academic exercise, because Austin Energy is working toward 10 megawatts of distributed storage and 55 percent renewable energy by 2025. The grid implications of that surge will manifest more acutely in a smaller, municipal-sized service territory.
Kurt Stogdill, green building and sustainability manager for Austin Energy, pointed out that “200 megawatts [of] PV spread over 437 square miles is different from 200 megawatts spread over the whole of ERCOT.”
The program started with a challenge to reach a 14 cents per kilowatt-hour levelized cost of energy for solar and energy storage. The utility won $4.3 million from the DOE’s Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) program, in addition to $1 million from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to support the solar-plus-storage exploration.
To get the costs down that low, the team started looking at how to add value with intelligent controls, rather than leaving the distributed resources to operate independently.
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