Con Edison, SunPower to launch virtual power plant

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Con Edison, a subsidiary of energy company Consolidated Edison, has partnered with SunPower to launch a pilot to offer solar power systems with battery storage to more than 300 New York homeowners.

The aggregation of hundreds of homes with solar power and battery storage will provide the utility with a cost-effective and innovative “virtual power plant,” providing participating homeowners with a backup system in case of an outage while also supplementing the traditional energy delivery model to improve grid resiliency, reliability and sustainability.

The program results from New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative, designed to harness and integrate renewables into the state’s power grid.

With the integration of over 1.8 megawatts of solar power and about 1.8 megawatts, or 4 megawatt hours, of battery storage, this partnership will represent the largest residential distributed energy storage program in the U.S., the company said.

Under the program, qualified participants will have leased high-efficiency SunPower solar systems installed on their homes to help reduce the homeowners’ monthly electricity costs.

For an additional low monthly payment, participants also will have Sunverge Energy battery systems, owned by Con Edison, installed and connected to their SunPower systems. In the event of an outage, solar power stored in a participant’s battery storage system will be available to power certain essential load appliances in the home.

Using the storage system’s intelligence, Con Edison will be able to link the hundreds of solar-plus-storage systems together into a “virtual power plant” that can act as a local generation resource to supply power to the grid during peak usage periods.

The system will also include Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) integration to provide remote monitoring and control, allowing Con Edison to forecast and optimize the performance and reduce the need for the utility to rely on traditional non-renewable power sources to meet peak demand.

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