Green Charge: How Energy Storage Can Support Your Sustainability Efforts
Energy storage is a versatile tool that can help support sustainability efforts while also enhancing operations and improving your bottom line.
Commercial and industrial organizations can benefit from adding energy storage to their sustainability plans, from increasing the use of renewables and adding resilience to cutting demand charges and supporting the grid.
Energy storage makes it more economical to add more solar generation. Businesses can leverage energy storage to consume all of the solar power they produce, rather than feeding it back to the grid — offsetting energy purchases and reducing utility bills. Rocky Mountain Institute has found the increase in solar PV self consumption due to energy storage has a value of about $25 per kilowatt-year and demand charge reduction could be worth as much as $200 per kilowatt-year. Studies have also found the pairing of solar-plus-storage is also greater than the sum of the two parts for demand charge savings.
Energy storage allows both renewable energy and lower-cost off-peak power to be used well beyond the times when they are produced. When energy storage uses clean, renewable generation to meet peak demand instead of natural gas peaking plants, it can nearly eliminate associated CO2 emissions. Not only can storage reduce the need for dirty peaker plants across the entire grid, but for individual organizations it can eliminate the need for expensive, fossil-fuel backup generation and associated fuel storage.
Energy storage improves the economics of innovative, attention-getting corporate programs such as electric vehicle charging. An electric vehicle charging off of the grid has less than half the emissions of a gas-powered car, and it’s even cleaner if it’s charging on energy stored from renewable sources, a win-win for meeting sustainability goals. Also, vehicles that charge during peak periods can be served from energy storage,
again reducing kWh and demand charges.
For most businesses today, emission reduction goals are typically part of top-down sustainability mandates. Management often expects these targets to be met at effectively no cost. Applied carefully, the economic and environmental benefits of energy storage typically outweigh the costs, providing a positive return on investment. State policies are also evolving quickly, and there are increasing opportunities for C&I organizations to realize new revenue streams by selling grid services to utilities. For instance, they might deploy on-site energy storage to help relieve local grid congestion, or to boost local power quality.
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