SMUD Named in Grant Funding for Energy Storage Project

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and partners Premium Power, National Grid and three others will receive $7.32 million from one of only 16 Smart Grid Energy Storage Demonstration Grants awarded by the Department of Energy under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The grant is designed to enable National Grid and SMUD to demonstrate the benefits of multihour, zinc-bromine flow battery-based energy storage systems for load shifting, peak shaving, renewable energy integration and support for microgrid operations over a three-year period.

Premium Power chose to work with SMUD and National Grid--two utilities recognized for their work on advanced and renewable technologies. “Energy storage is potentially a game-changer in our industry, ” said SMUD Assistant General Manager of Energy Supply Jim Shetler. “So this is a very exciting project for SMUD.”

SMUD will host two of the seven sites. SMUD plans to set up the energy storage systems at the SMUD Microgrid Demonstration site located at the utility’s headquarters campus and at a substation serving a SolarSmart HomesSM community in Rancho Cordova, California.

SMUD’s headquarters storage system will provide valuable information for improving microgrid operations including emergency operations such as campus islanding. Additionally, the system will be used to augment peak period campus operation using electricity generated off-peak. The storage system in the Anatolia substation will be integrated with the SolarSmart HomesSM community.

The value of storing power at the serving substation rather than at the source of the photovoltaic (PV) system will allow testing to include the impact of small PV aggregation within the distribution circuit. SMUD will also be installing smart metering in the Anatolia subdivision so that peak load can be managed in conjunction with distributed PV generation.

The addition of reliable storage to the circuit will enable exploration of new procedures to optimize distributed PV generation, demand response and storage in a controlled environment. Both storage systems will be controlled from a common control system to demonstrate fleet control of multiple distributed storage devices.

The other five demonstration sites will be located in Syracuse, New York and Everett, Massachusetts. Expected benefits of the energy storage project include enhanced power quality, a better matching of renewable resources to peak load periods, the ability to provide additional capacity at peak and superpeak periods, and energy arbitrage or the ability to charge batteries with inexpensive off-peak electricity and use the stored power at super-peak periods when electricity costs are highest.

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