Back in December, Swell Energy said it would be raising $450 million to support the development of distributed power projects in three states. Now, with the announcement of a deal between the venture-backed startup and New York City’s utility, ConEd, industry watchers can get a glimpse of what those projects may look like.
The Los Angeles-based company has a new residential solar plus energy storage program for homeowners in Queens that’s going to be rolled out in partnership with ConEd.
It’s a project that will create solar-powered home batteries for eligible ConEd customers.
New York is actually targeting the rollout of 3 gigawatts of installed energy storage capacity by 2030 with a goal of moving the entire state’s electricity grid to zero emissions by 2040.
With the ConEd project, the city is hoping to create backup power for customers in Queens that they can tap independently of the energy grid’s own resources, which should free up power for customers that don’t have the energy storage tech.
The New York virtual power plant differs from other initiatives from Swell in that it provides available capacity to specific distribution circuits on the grid to reduce customer demand on circuits during network overload periods, according to a Swell spokesperson.
With the virtual power plant, ConEd won’t need to build out new transmission and distribution infrastructure, but can still ensure network reliability. It’s what’s called a “non-wires solution” to the demand problem, Swell’s spokesperson said.
By contrast, the company’s Hawaii projects provide system-level capacity and frequency regulation and the California program with Southern California Edison provides demand-response capacity for baseload energy management and overall load growth in the area where they’re operating.
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