At 1Energy Systems, we see utility-owned energy storage as the foundation for a safe, reliable electric grid that relies significantly more on distributed resources for over the coming years. This post explains our vision.
The need to reduce carbon emissions is driving major changes to the electricity system, from the rapidly increasing adoption of wind and solar power to the increased interest in energy storage technologies to “firm” those intermittent sources of power. As energy consumers become more sophisticated, they are more likely to opt into demand response programs that enable them to lower their energy use when overall demand (and therefore prices) is high. Electric vehicles represent a new source of significant electricity use that consumers can potentially manage through smart charging programs.
These trends have created a new class of “assets” – often called Distributed Energy Resources — that distribution utilities must account for in their role as operators of the electricity grid that serves us all. Viewed one way, the new assets are a major problem, introducing unpredictability, volatility, and two-way power flows into a system designed to be extremely reliable and support power flow in only one direction (to the end user). However, properly orchestrated, these distributed resources could provide the flexibility and resiliency needed to operate an electric grid with dramatically more renewable generation while maintaining the safety, reliability, and affordability that we expect from that grid.
For 1Energy, enabling our utility customers to support and utilize distributed energy resources is at the center of our company’s mission, and we know the important role that great software will play in this pursuit. The industry as a whole also sees this and has acknowledged a new category of software called Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems or DERMS. We recently announced our DERMS product called 1E-DERO™ which, along with our 1E-IC™, represents the progress we have made toward our mission. While designed to allow for future extension to other classes of distributed resources, both of our software products have started with a focus on utility-scale energy storage. The rest of this post explains both the technical (power engineering) and non-technical reasons why we have made the choice to start with storage first.
From a technical perspective, energy storage represents what we call a “superset” or “four-quadrant” resource, as shown by the green shaded area on the power circle diagram at the right. That means storage can act like either a load or generator along the full extent of the horizontal P axis, and it can also consume or produce reactive power (VArs) along the full extent of the vertical Q axis. In other words, an energy storage system can contribute services across the full range of functions needed to support a reliable and efficient electric grid, from load and generation balancing to voltage management. Solar power, demand response and traditional circuit management devices like capacitors all make valuable contributions to the engineering requirements of managing this new, more dynamic and distributed grid as shown in the diagram. But no other device or resource represents the kind of flexibility from an engineering perspective – a fast responding resource across all four quadrants of the power circle – that makes energy storage an invaluable foundation for solving this critical grid puzzle.
But why start with utility-owned storage? Can’t energy storage make those contributions to the grid whether it is owned by the utility or by a customer? Answering these questions requires introducing some other important criteria for assessing these new distributed assets and the role they can play moving forward.
Criteria such as:
![Superset Table]()
Speed: How fast can the resource respond when called on? This is both a function of the roundtrip communication speed to the resource as well as its ability to react once it has been given a request.- Reliability: To what degree can the grid operator rely on the resource? Are its full capabilities available 24x7x365, or are there constraints on when it is available, or on the degree to which is it available?
- Flexibility: How flexible is the resources across all four quadrants of the power circle (discussed above)?
- Control/Ownership: Is the resource available and functional to perform when needed? This represents the ultimate level of reliability where the grid operator not only has contractual rights to the full capabilities of the resource, but controls other aspects of reliability such as maintenance and upkeep.
Given all of these considerations, we believe that utility-owned energy storage combined with a sophisticated software platform will be a foundational element within the emerging grid that embraces distributed energy resources. Every other distributed resource discussed above will make important contributions to that system’s performance, and the new software platform must be able to interact with them all. Because most of them will have a lower cost per unit of functionality than utility-owned storage, we believe that, over time, they will collectively represent the vast majority of the resources that power and manage the grid.
But a system as important as the electric grid must sit on a rock-solid foundation and, for us, that foundation is utility-owned energy storage.
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