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Camas, Wash. — July 21, 2015 — SmartStorage, from Sharp Electronics Corp.’s Energy Systems and Services Group, is a battery-based demand management system designed to reduce the peak electricity use of commercial and industrial buildings.
The behind-the-meter energy storage system combines Sharp’s intelligent energy-management software with UL-listed lithium-ion battery cells and battery racks (supplied by a leading global manufacturer). For customers who sign up for Sharp’s 10-year service agreement, Sharp will guarantee a specific demand reduction.
The SmartStorage system employs predictive controls to manage the release of stored energy. The software predicts how many hours a facility will be operating above a particular demand threshold, then monitors loads in real time, so that stored energy can be released if demand reaches the threshold.
“The software takes care of all the complexity in terms of when to charge and discharge the battery, so the customer doesn’t need to do anything,” says Carl Mansfield, general manager and founder of Sharp’s Energy Systems and Services Group.
Three factors are driving the market for energy storage, Mansfield says. One is that utility demand rates are increasing, and are often the fastest growing part of a facility’s energy bill. The SmartStorage system predicts demand spikes and seamlessly discharges energy with precise timing to offset demand charges, with no behavioral changes required by the customer.
Declining costs for lithium-ion batteries are a second factor helping to make energy storage a more viable option for commercial facilities, says Mansfield. A third factor is utility incentives. Those certainly help, but Mansfield says facilities may see a favorable ROI even without incentives.
The SmartStorage system is available configured as either a one-hour or two-hour duration system and is scalable from a 30kW to 480kW power rating. To determine the size of the system, the company reviews a year’s worth of 15-minute-interval data from the utility. Based on that operational profile, the system monitors consumption at the site in real time and make predictions as to when to discharge. The system also continuously re-predicts consumption throughout the day.
The system can be deployed with or without an onsite solar installation. It performs better with integrated solar assets because solar can favorably narrow the load peak. The system can also make solar installations economically viable where they otherwise would not be, in cases of limited space for deploying PV capacity.
The system is available with an optional 10-year asset management service agreement, which provides continuous whole-system remote monitoring, performance tuning, maintenance, automated in-field updates, and post-deployment feature additions.
“We have built-in real-time alerting and error handling,” Mansfield says. “Oftentimes, if there is an issue, we resolve it without the customer even knowing about it.”
Mansfield describes the service agreement as “relatively inexpensive.” The agreement also includes a guarantee of a minimum level of kW demand savings. If guaranteed demand reductions are not met, Sharp will compensate for the deficit in promised peak-demand reductions. “Because this is a new technology that doesn’t have four or five years of proven energy savings, that performance guarantee is really crucial,” says Mansfield. “It makes the system bankable over a 10-year period.
To learn more about SmartStorage, go to www.sharpsmartstorage.com.
