The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is partnering with a technology company to help manage its renewable power and encourage customers to switch to solar with energy storage capacity.
SMUD announced its partnership Thursday with Southern California-based Swell Energy, which provides solar services and energy management technologies for homeowners, businesses and utilities.
“As more SMUD customers add solar panel systems paired with battery storage solutions, they’ll be better able to manage their own energy needs while making meaningful contributions toward reducing their community’s carbon footprint,” Lora Anguay, chief zero carbon officer of SMUD, said in a news release.
SMUD will use Swell’s platform to launch what it called a "virtual power plant," which will aggregate and centralize the power from all the homes that have installed solar and battery storage.
“Our collaborative virtual power plant will provide real-time energy management and synchronized battery dispatch across SMUD’s customer base, enabling large-scale renewable deployment and minimizing the need for conventional power plants in the region,” Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan said in a news release. “We believe this model is a beacon for how municipal utilities and other publicly owned utilities can achieve scale and value with distributed energy resources.”
A new SMUD program, called My Energy Optimizer Partner+, will allow customers to operate their own solar systems to manage their own energy needs and the needs of the broader grid. Customers will get both upfront and ongoing compensation for participating in the program, based on the capacity of their solar and energy storage systems. Customers can begin enrolling in the program at the beginning of the year, with operations planned to start in April.
According to the news release, there are 600 individual energy storage systems in SMUD’s service area, with another 400 in the interconnection process.
The initial launch of the program could give SMUD 20 megawatt-hours and 10 megawatts of renewable energy capacity, with the opportunity to scale to 54 megawatt-hours and 27 megawatts over the term of the partnership.
