Early this month, Generate Capital, a sustainable infrastructure finance company, and Sharp Electronics Corporation’s Energy Systems and Services Group announced the commencement of a six-site solar plus storage project at the Santa Rita Union School District (SRUSD) in Salinas, California. The project will include more than a megawatt (MW) of solar arrays, combined with 1.2 megawatt-hours (MWh) of Sharp’s SmartStorage on-site energy storage.
This initiative will be supported through the state’s reinvigorated Self-Generation Incentive Program, which offers significant incentives to bring more storage to the California power grid. The SRUSD will be able to cut energy costs (during some months, as much as 70-80% of the district’s electricity needs will be met by the systems). The district will also significantly reduce its expensive hourly utility demand charges (a dollars-per-kilowatt fee based on one’s highest demand during the month that can easily contribute to 30-40% of the total bill).
This project is part of a growing trend as the U.S. market has recently seen a significant uptick in the addition of on-site energy storage. GTM research reportsthat Q2 2017 saw 443 commercial and residential storage projects installed, totaling 32 MW. A large portion of these recent projects emanated from Hawaii and California. Solar and storage hybrids are coming on strong and will likely soon become commonplace, so from that perspective, the SRUSD project is not especially newsworthy.
What is newsworthy is the fact that the project was designed not only to save money, but also to provide critical backup power to the schools in the event of power outages. The project can help the SRUSD ride through brownouts or short-term outages, as well as longer-duration events. And in the aftermath of the recent devastation in Florida and Texas, the importance of backup power has increasingly come into focus.
Recent Comments