Solar+Storage for Low-and Moderate-Income Communities: A Guide for States and Municipalities

The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) has produced a new report for states and municipalities on solar+storage for low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. The report explains how solar+storage can benefit LMI residents and describes a variety of policy tools for doing so, including grants, rebates, utility procurement standards, financing support, opening markets, and soft cost reduction

Resilient Power Project Case Study: Sterling Municipal Light Department

Sterling Municipal Light Department (SMLD) is a municipal utility serving the small New England town of Sterling, Massachusetts, with 3,700 residential, commercial, municipal, and industrial customers. In 2013, with a total of 3.2 megawatts (MW) of solar PV installed, SMLD became the number one utilityin the country for solar watts per customer. Solar accounted for approximately 30 percent of SMLD's peak load. At this high level of penetration, the variable nature of solar generation bagan to cause problems. Additionally, the costs of capacity and transmission services, based on SMLD"s peak demand for power purchased from the grid operator, were rising dramatically. These costs increased from $500,000 in 2010 to$1.2 million in 2017. SMLD needed a new strategy to firm the output of its solar generation and control rising costs linked to the utility's share of regional demand peak.The town of Sterling was considering adding a natural gas peaker plant to avoid rising capacity costs at its Municipal Light Department. But this idea was abandoned when the option of energy storage presented itself in the form of a state grant program offered through the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER), called the Community Clean Energy Resiliency Initiative (CCERI). The grant program, initiated after Superstorm Sandy devastated the Northeast,w as designed to support municipal resilient clean energy systems. The town had also been hit by an ice storm in 2008, which had left residents without power for up to 14 days; thus, reciliency had been a longtime conern for the town. Energy storage presented an attractive means to firm the town's solar resources, add reciliency for critical infrastructure, and control rising costs

Energy Storage: The New Efficiency

This report, which describes how states can use energy efficiency funds to provide incentives for energy storage, is a publication of Clean energy group (CEG), with appendices containing several white papers prepared by the applied economics Clinic under contract to CEG. This report explains the steps Massachusetts took to become the first state to integrate energy storage technologies into its energy efficiency plan, including actions to 1) expand the goals and definition of energy efficiency to include peak demand reduction, and 2) show that customer-sited battery storage can pass the required cost-effectiveness test. The report summarizes the economics of battery cost/benefit calculations, examines key elements of incentive design, and shows how battery storage would have been found to be even more cost-effective had the non-energy benefits of batteries been included in the calculations. The report also introduces seven non-energy benefits of batteries, and for the first time, assigns values to them. Finally, the report provides recommendations to other states for how to incentivize energy storage within their own energy efficiency plans. Four appendices provide detailed economics analysis, along with recommendations to Massachusetts on improving its demand reduction incentive program in future iterations of the energy efficiency plan