ACES Award winners in MA show diversity in energy storage solutions
More than 20 projects across the state of Massachusetts and from a wide variety of industry sectors have received more than $20 million in grants for providing energy storage solutions.
During a Clean Energy States Alliance webinar on Thursday, Aug. 9, representatives from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center talked about the Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) program and how they had distributed more than $20 million in grants to promote energy storage solutions. The ACES program was created through a partnership between the Center and the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.
The 1-to-1 grants reflected an effort by the Center to focus on incentivizing market investment into storage solutions, not only to increase energy storage activity across the state but also to educate stakeholders, residents and businesses about energy storage, said Galen Nelson, Senior Director of Innovative and Industrial Support with MassCEC.
“Through ACES, we were able to award up to $20 million and leverage $31 million in funding from other sources,” Nelson said. “This showed us that the incentive program was at the right time for our [request for proposal].”
The center received nearly 70 applications for the awards, and only three of them, Kavita Ravi, director of emerging markets for MassCEC said, didn’t qualify.
Of the projects that were awarded grants, the industries they supported ranged from schools to hospitals to residential utilities to hotels and defense sites.
Most important in the awards process, Ravi said, was ensuring that the project was a continuing one and not something that was a one-off.
“There had to be a sustained public benefit for the projects,” she said. “This also helps in educating a variety of stakeholders. Once you see the effective us of a project in a Walmart, for example, you are more likely to see similar projects in other big box retailers. We hope to see further projects and policy support stem from this in the future.”
The project grants included:
- A Li-On battery system on the roof of Boston Medical Center to serve as a back-up for their critical support systems and redundancy in case of a power outage.
- A 13.21 Kwh system in 500 homes in Nantucket to help with the distribution system in Nantucket, which would provide backup power benefits and help with cost-savings for the island community.
- A 1,500/3,000 Mwh battery storage system to provide power to a manufacturing client.
Many of the projects also included non-monetized benefits that, Ravi said, could be monetized in the future. Non-monetized benefits, such as lifting the moratorium on solar power or reducing voltage flicker on distribution channels, provided no avenue for monetization. But, she said, she was optimistic that some benefits would be monetized in the future.
Many of the projects are self-funded Nelson said, although some are funded through shared saving with project developers and owner-operators, and some are funded through leasing arrangements that optimize the savings benefits.
MassCEC’s request for proposal is available online and free for others to use, Ravi said, and has already been used several times in other communities to generate similar projects.
The webinar also featured information from Rhode Island’s Block Island Offshore Wind Farm. According to Chris Kearn, with the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, the Block Island project went live in 2016 after nearly a decade in planning and development and is sending back useful data for future projects. Generating more than 400 MW, the wind farm has had no issues since operation began two years ago, and is proving to be valuable during the winter months during peak energy season.
Future projects are expected to take significantly less time and have dramatically lower costs, he said.
