Renewable energy developer Kearsarge Energy expects a 20-50% revenue uplift for a solar-plus-storage project in the New England ISO market by using Customized Energy Solutions’ optimisation platform.
Customized Energy Solutions (CES) has partnered with Kearsarge to optimise the performance and revenue generation of the latter’s 4.4MW PV / 10MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) site in Bellingham, Massachusetts. CES will use its bidding and scheduling optimisation platform, GridBOOST.
The companies expect the platform to increase the co-located project’s revenue by between 20% and 50% by optimising its participation in the New England ISO capacity and frequency regulation markets. The project was delivered in February for Kearsarge by global EV/BESS solution group NHOA.
GridBOOST will also help the project capitalise on the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Targets (SMART) and Massachusetts Clean Peak Energy Standard incentive programmes. SMART provides guaranteed payment to investors in community solar – in this case the nearby town of Randolph – by their utility over a 20-year period. The Clean Peak Energy Standard programme provides incentives to renewable resources that can supply electricity or reduce demand during peak periods.
It is not uncommon for co-located storage projects in Massachusetts to use all four revenue sources (capacity, regulation, SMART and Clean Peak) including those run by community solar, and increasingly solar-plus-storage group Nexamp as its VP for energy storage Mark Frigo recently told Energy-Storage.news. He said the state is only one of a handful in the US to have put in place incentives like these, along with California and New York.
In that same article, which originally ran in our quarterly journal PV Tech Power, Mary Cauwels, VP of product marketing at smart energy storage technology and services provider Stem Inc, gave a revenue breakdown of a typical co-located site in the state: 34% from the energy market, 27% from the capacity market, 15% from real time reserves, 12% from Clean Peak and 12% from frequency regulation.
CES said that GridBOOST integrates data from multiple sources to make holistic, data-driven scheduling and bidding decisions unlike ramp-based generation profiles that have traditionally guided storage dispatch and charging. It added that the platform’s algorithm accounts for the technology constraints and operational performance of the system, and external factors including market rules, wholesale trading price forecasts, weather forecasts and available incentive programmes.
“Working with CES has enabled us to maximise the revenue streams of our storage assets and extend our market leadership position for co-located solar and energy storage in a competitive market,” said Andrew Bernstein, managing partner at Kearsarge Energy.
The GridBOOST platform available in CAISO and ISO-NE and CES plans to expand it into other major US grid markets like ERCOT in Texas, NYISO in New York state, and PJM which covers a handful of states in the Midwest, South and North of the US.