Business View Magazine | September 2019

211 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 you’re going to need more energy and it’s going to cost you more. So, these batteries will kick in and avoid those high peak prices. We’re going to put them on approximately 10 businesses to start; we are planning to install 10 Megawatts of battery storage and five additional Megawatts of solar citywide throughout the course of this grant program. “There’s another reason why we want to do this virtual power plant: by incorporating a software program, we can aggregate all of our city-owned distributed energy resource assets. For example, we have solar on all of our Lancaster School District sites. Lancaster owns that energy and we have a power purchase agreement with the school district; we purchased that energy ahead of time and they pay us back through a fixed-rate contract, so it was a no up-front, out-of-pocket cost to the schools for the installation. There are 25 sites that have solar, and we have city buildings that have solar. We will be putting in battery storage at a minimum of ten businesses citywide. We also have city-owned electric vehicle charging stations that we will incorporate. Having the ability to aggregate that energy, virtually, gives us an opportunity to offset the energy that we buy, which helps the entire community. If we can offset the energy and use our assets, rather than purchasing on the market, we can bring our costs down, and we can bring our prices down – thus keeping our rates low. To my knowledge, it will be the first virtual power plant in operation – which is a major reason why it was included in the CPUC grant. We’re going to see if it works and design it in a way that other communities can replicate in the future.” pictured below sPower CEO Ryan Creamer with Lancaster Planning Commission Chair Jim Vose LANCASTER , CAL I FORNI A