Q&A: How to ‘Unlock the Power of the Demand Side of the Meter as a Grid Resource’

By Julia Pyper

Advanced Micro­grid Sys­tems, a com­pa­ny almost no one had heard of until last fall, announced a land­mark part­ner­ship with SunEdi­son this week to finance and devel­op 50 megawatts of dis­trib­uted ener­gy stor­age under a 10-year capac­i­ty con­tract with South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Edison.

AMS and SunEdi­son will deploy stor­age projects at com­mer­cial sites across the West Los Ange­les Basin as part of SCE’s 2013 Local Capac­i­ty Require­ment solic­i­ta­tion, intend­ed to sub­sti­tute gen­er­a­tion from the now-shut­tered San Onofre nuclear plant. AMS is work­ing with SCE from the out­set to deploy stor­age where the grid is most stressed — such as in solar-rich areas with a steep rise in evening demand. The util­i­ty will be able to call on an aggre­ga­tion of bat­ter­ies to reduce load at hybrid elec­tric build­ings by megawatts at a time.

“Ener­gy stor­age is the enabling tech­nol­o­gy here. We’re using ener­gy stor­age as the mech­a­nism to inte­grate and unlock the pow­er of the demand side of the meter as a grid resource,” said Susan Kennedy, CEO and co-founder of AMS, in an interview.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it Green Tech Media.