AMS gets $200m from Macquarie for storage+software to provide grid services

Susan Kennedy, CEO of San Fran­cis­co-based Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions, says, “The entire elec­tri­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem [has been] designed around a sin­gle premise: You can­not store ener­gy.” That long-held tru­ism is one AMS is chal­leng­ing, aid­ed by state reg­u­la­tors’ open­ness to dis­trib­uted ener­gy solu­tions. AMS, which just received a $200 mil­lion cap­i­tal infu­sion from Mac­quar­ie Group, aims to put the fund­ing into a fleet of bat­tery projects. Kennedy told Green­tech Media recent­ly, “We’re offer­ing util­i­ties a cus­tomized solu­tion using ener­gy stor­age behind the cus­tomer’s meter…to pro­vide specif­i­cal­ly what the util­i­ty needs in a par­tic­u­lar region. It’s a clean, fast, flex­i­ble prod­uct that does­n’t exist in the util­i­ty world today.” The new fund­ing will enable devel­op­ment and oper­a­tion of a fleet of AMS’ dis­trib­uted ener­gy stor­age projects at host sites to pro­vide var­i­ous util­i­ty grid services.

Among projects the fund­ing will enable are a 50-MW con­tract with South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Edi­son to pro­vide behind-the-meter bat­tery stor­age in the West­ern Los Ange­les Basin; a bat­tery stor­age deploy­ment with the Irvine Com­pa­ny across 24 office build­ings equipped with Tes­la Pow­er­packs and AMS soft­ware, to shave peaks while pro­vid­ing SCE up to 10 MW of capac­i­ty; and oth­er projects with Opus One Solu­tions, Sky­scraper One Mar­itime Plaza, Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, Shell Ener­gy North Amer­i­ca andInland Empire Util­i­ties. AMS has also received equi­ty fund­ing from DBL Invest­ments, Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger and Engie SA.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it Elec­tric­i­ty Pol­i­cy.