Comments have poured into the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in recent weeks on proposed rules that industry players say would boost energy storage in wholesale markets and open new opportunity for microgrids.
Issued in November, the FERC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) attempts to smooth the way for energy storage to transact in six regional wholesale markets that span much of the U.S. The proposal (RM-16-23) also gives distributed energy aggregators wholesale market inroads.
As is customary, FERC has called on stakeholders to comment on the ideas before it puts them into effect. More than 100 companies, utilities, organizations and state agencies have weighed in.
The interest isn’t surprising. Ted Ko, policy director at Stem, says the proposal has monumental significance.
“It is probably the most significant thing at the federal level ever in terms of the rules changing for our business model,” said Ko. Stem aggregates energy storage so that it can participate in energy markets. The company’s mission is to build and operate a digitally connected energy storage network.
Under the FERC proposal, such aggregations could at last get the chance to compete against the power plants that now dominate the wholesale markets.
“It is finally going to make the different wholesale markets around the country adjust their rules to accommodate what energy storage is capable of doing,” Ko said in a recent interview.
Existing rules were designed long before the rise of energy storage and microgrids. Hence, they accommodate the sale of energy, capacity and ancillary services by large, centralized generators, but not small distributed energy resources (DERs) and energy storage in wholesale markets.
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