Colchester, Vt. – Green Mountain Power (GMP) is adding grid-connected energy storage in six communities, to further accelerate its work to cut carbon and costs for customers, while strengthening the greater grid. GMP is working with battery companies and local developers to build cost-competitive energy storage projects in Vermont and purchase battery power to put back on the grid to save customers money. The storage projects selected will nearly double the current peak energy savings for GMP customers, and batteries will be in Georgia, Springfield, Bethel, Middlebury, Bristol, and Barre.
The new projects are adding 25 MW of energy storage and will be online in the next two years, joining GMP’s existing fleet of more than 30 MW of residential and large-scale storage throughout Vermont. The projects deliver savings for customers by reducing peak energy costs and carbon emissions on high energy use days, avoiding the need to buy power from the regional grid.
“Energy storage is a critical aspect of the important grid transformation underway in Vermont,” said GMP president and CEO Mari McClure. “Working in partnership with businesses, communities, and Vermonters, we are delivering more savings, more carbon reductions, and stronger local communities.”
Already GMP’s industry-leading battery programs saved customers $3 million a year for the last several years. These new batteries are projected to double those savings for customers, helping save an additional $3 million a year. Storage through GMP’s programs gives the grid more flexibility which also adds resilience, strengthens the grid, and helps enable more local renewables and more clean electrification.
Through an agreement with WEG, an energy storage developer, GMP added 5MW of battery storage located in Barre last year. Another battery of 3MW will be added in Bristol next year through an agreement with Agilitas Energy of Massachusetts, with the other storage projects coming online in the next two years.
“It’s so great to work with such a forward-thinking utility like Green Mountain Power,” said Barrett Bilotta, President of Agilitas Energy. “By continuing to leverage the benefits of storage—GMP is doing right by its customers, the grid, and the energy transition, all at the same time.”
In addition to these grid scale projects, GMP is the first utility in the country to offer full, regulator-approved home battery programs to customers. Participants get discounted home energy storage for seamless backup power during storms, and they agree to share stored energy with all customers during energy peaks. GMP’s residential programs include Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Enphase, and Powerwall programs and GMP works with commercial customers on custom battery solutions for their businesses.
About Green Mountain Power
Green Mountain Power serves approximately 270,000 residential and business customers in Vermont with electricity that’s 100% carbon free and 68% renewable, and GMP is partnering with them to improve lives and transform communities. GMP is providing solutions to cut carbon and is delivering electricity that is clean, affordable, and always on. GMP is the first utility in the world to get a B Corp certification, meeting rigorous social, environmental, accountability and transparency standards and committing to use business as a force for good. In 2022, GMP was named to TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential Companies. Fast Company named GMP one of the top five Most Innovative Companies in North America in 2022. GMP also earned a spot on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the World list in the energy sector four years in a row, and in 2021 the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) honored GMP as a nationwide leader in energy transformation.
GMP has to add highly subsidized, very expensive battery storage in distribution grids with many highly subsidized solar systems, because the midday solar output surge would grossly upset the grid, and may even spill over onto the NE HV grid, which would not be appreciated by ISO-NE.
Very expensive midday solar electricity, about 15 plus c/kW (A to Z basis), is charged into the batteries.
Most of that electricity is discharged from the batteries during the peak demand hours of late-afternoon/early-evening, when rates are about 7 to 8c/kWh.
The charging/discharging losses of the battery systems are about 15 to 18%, i.e., up to 18% of that expensive midday solar electricity is lost!!
Please tell me how that leads to energy savings, other than GMP, and the well-connected.
If they are using terms like “MW” of energy storage, they are either clueless or lying.
There is no such thing as any number of megawatts of energy storage.
I imagine they imply something like megawatt hours of storage, but that is not what they are saying, and if people make policy on energy have less than a junior high school understanding of what power and energy are (not the same thing), how are they qualified to make decisions that cost us in taxes and utility bills?
More evidence that this is all posturing and virtue signaling, but it costs us dearly, and it is evil.
Spot on! My first thought reading the article was, do they even know what they’re talking about. Or are they lying? A megawatt is not an energy unit, not a storage unit. It’s a power unit. So, do they mean their new battery banks have a maximum output of 25 MW? For how long? Ten seconds? I’ve read that all the batteries in the world at present could power the world’s electricity use for something like 4 seconds. It’s all utter nonsense driven by master manipulators with hidden agendas, leading a population of clueless ideologues and useful idiots using unconstitutional subsidies funded with our stolen wealth. The people making these decisions pay no price for being wrong. They’re spending other people’s money, and the failures are largely hidden from view, never exposed. They have no skin in the game. Government funding tends to corrupt science because a scientist has to be politically correct to get funding, and government subsidies corrupt business because when it’s not your money, failures or inefficient uses of capital aren’t quickly corrected, if at all. Spread this message. Wake people up, starting with friends and family. The only solution is to vote these people out.
the primary value of battery storage is to provide instant load capacity, while the gas turbines are coming on line. Calling it anything more is BS, and anyone who knows how the grid works, and people use power are the facts GMP and the liberal idiots are avoiding.