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Reduce your bill with our energy storage incentive
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Reduce your bill with our energy storage incentive

How Batteries Help Everyone

There are obvious reasons why installing a battery energy storage system is a great way to make your business more efficient. Batteries can provide electricity in the event of an outage and are a greener alternative to diesel backup generation. But did you know that a battery can also help you during demand response events reduce peak loads on the network?

Demand for electrification in British Columbia is steadily increasing. And while switching to clean electricity helps significantly reduce greenhouse gases, the amount of electricity required by the province will begin to exceed infrastructure capacity within a decade.

We are busy today implementing all kinds of solutions that will help everyone tomorrow. And one of them is our incentive for energy storage.

6 Ways Energy Storage Can Help Your Business

There are many benefits to adding an energy storage system to your facility. Here are six reasons why you might consider purchasing and installing a battery with an incentive:

1. Increased reliability and resilience

Depending on the battery size you choose, your facility will be able to continue operating during a power outage, maintaining productivity and avoiding downtime.

2. Reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG)

A battery is a great replacement for a diesel backup generator because by not burning diesel you reduce your GHG emissions.

3. Energy quality

Batteries also offer better power quality than diesel generators. In the event of a breakdown, a diesel generator can take several minutes to start, requiring mechanical systems to be shut down and restarted. But the time it takes for a battery to fire can be measured in milliseconds, allowing for smooth power transfer.

4. Defer site or panel upgrades with electrification

If your facility has 200 amp service and you want to replace some fossil fuel-based equipment with electrical equipment, you may be considering upgrading to 400 amp service, which requires several upgrades to the site and signs. But with a battery, you could defer these costs because your battery would absorb the extra charge.

5. Store excess solar energy

If you generate solar energy on-site to power your facility, adding a battery would allow you to store any excess or unused solar energy during sunny periods and then discharge it as needed to manage your energy usage .

6. Demand management

As we mentioned at the start, there is also a lesser known, but very important, reason why you might want to take advantage of energy storage: demand management and demand response. We asked Paul Seo, Senior Product Manager at BC Hydro, to explain what it is and how it works.

“Around 20 times a year we experience periods of very high demand on the network. When this happens, we hold demand response events where we ask customers to reduce their consumption for up to four hours,” Paul explains. “If you buy and install a battery through our energy storage incentive, you have to take part in these events – but instead of having to reduce your consumption, you simply indicate how much energy you are going to use from your battery.

“We can manage your battery remotely,” says Paul. “This is called demand response. Based on the total battery capacity, the customer allocates a designated amount for BC Hydro and a reserved amount for the site. We can send signals from our Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) to discharge the battery during demand response events, based on the amount of energy you nominated. But your rating cannot exceed your previous winter average peak. .

Here’s how it works:

Normal use (100 kWh is an example)