A year after Massachusetts awarded $20 million in energy storage grants, the first project is online and showing promise to help shave peak demand, save customers money, and pave the way for more solar power.
Municipal utility Braintree Electric Light Department (BELD) paid for most of the $2.6 million battery installation using its reserve funds and some of its business customers invested additional money in exchange for lower demand charges.
But it was a grant from Massachusetts’ Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) program that helped make the numbers add up for the pilot project. The program is part of the state’s Energy Storage Initiative, which has a goal of deploying 200 megawatt-hours of energy storage in the state by 2020, up from the current level of seven megawatt-hours.
In 2016, the state commissioned a report on the use of energy storage in the state and strategies to expand its deployment. Among the recommendations was a grant program to provide at least $10 million to demonstration projects that would identify and resolve obstacles to storage deployment, explore business models, and help developers gain experience working through the kinks of the process.
This proposal became the ACES program. In December 2017, the state announced $20 million in grants — twice the original target sum — to 26 projects planned for commercial sites, utilities, hospitals and education institutions.
The battery storage industry is at a pivotal moment, said Eric Hittinger, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Rochester with a focus on electricity production. Like solar a decade ago, storage technology is getting better and cheaper, and is widely perceived as having strong potential, but there is still some uncertainty about it, he said.
“People see it as a tech that can provide a lot of value,” he said. “But it’s perceived as a little bit risky — people are not sure how to use it, where to put it, what the business model is.”
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