Sunrun scales up digital power plant program with The golden state utility

• US domestic solar installer as well as renting company Sunrun will certainly aggregate residence solar-plus-storage systems right into a virtual power plant (VPP) efficient in giving 5MW of grid support, with California utility Southern California Edison (SCE).

Sunrun stated yesterday that it has actually signed a contract with SCE, among California's primary investor-owned utilities (IOUs). The solar firm's Brightbox home power storage packages will certainly reply to signals from SCE to provide their saved power capacity to the network sometimes of strain as well as high need for the grid, such as during severe heatwaves of the kind California sustained this summer.

With this contract, the systems will certainly take part in the Resource Adequacy (RA) program of the regional grid and market operator, California Independent System operator (CAISO). Source Adequacy is the means through which CAISO makes sure the lights stay on in the state and has actually been a vital driver for solar-plus-storage installments in California, including for massive projects.

Sunrun added that 10% or more of that RA ability will originate from Sunrun tools set up at low-to-moderate earnings houses. The company will begin mounting systems for this programme at the end of this year, with all installments expected to be completed by August 2023.

Sunrun's leadership consisting of CEO Lynn Jurich have actually said in the past that allowing solar-plus-storage systems to provide services for the grid provides incomes for the firm which can be utilized to lower the overall expense of power for its consumers.

The contract comes adhering to a preliminary 300-home demonstration introduced with SCE in June this year. In other places, Sunrun said earlier this month that it will be using Brighbox, which bundles up devices from service providers consisting of battery and battery system firm LG Chem, to all United States markets in which Sunrun runs.

Also in June this year, the business stated it has actually partnered with distributed energy resources (DERs) monitoring system provider AutoGrid, for AutoGrid's Flex software program platform to handle the Brightbox systems when aggregated into fleets. Sunrun stated at the time that it had actually by then acquired US$ 50 million well worth of grid solutions projects either already got or in the pipe.