Maximizing the Value of On-Site Energy Assets for Large Load Customers
On-site energy resources offer large load customers more than resilience, according to Todd Jackson, vice president of strategic development for PowerSecure, a distributed energy innovation company that’s a subsidiary of utility Southern Company. Jackson recently sat down with Rod Walton, managing editor of EnergyTech, to discuss how large load customers can more effectively leverage distributed energy resources (DER) and microgrids.
“On-site energy assets absolutely allow those large load customers to be a flexible demand resource for utility,” Jackson said. He explained that while most renewable and energy storage assets rarely sit idle, hybrid microgrids typically also include a natural gas or diesel-powered reciprocating engine asset.
“There are a lot of uses for that reciprocating engine,” Jackson said. It can be enrolled into an emergency services program, allowing short-term use of the asset as a supply side resource exporting power directly back to the grid. It could also be used as a distributed prime resource for longer periods of time, he added.
Either scenario provides an economic benefit to the asset owner.
A modular approach
Walton and Jackson also discussed how PowerSecure helps customers maximize the value of their on-site DERs.
The company’s energy market team determines the value of an asset’s capacity to the greater localized market for the customer.
Utilities benefit from flexible demand resources too
Customer-owned DERs can also support the grid at a time when load growth is on the rise.
The time to deploy distributed energy assets at a customer site is much less than the time it takes to upgrade transmission lines or install traditional grid infrastructure, Jackson said.
“We have some of the best lead times in the market because we are manufacturing our own equipment and we have our deployment crews that are very well versed and attuned to deploying the type of solutions that we deploy,” he said.
Plus, software applications, like PowerSecure’s power control application, “can aggregate up many sites into one dispatchable node for a utility or a grid operator,” making the energy from distributed resources easy to manage.
These solutions are a win-win, according to Jackson.
Asset owners are “helping the greater grid by having this solution in a localized place where the utility needs this capacity,” he said. And “they're helping themselves too, because they're going to have a resiliency solution” that ensures business continuity.
