Electrify America Invests In Sacramento-Area Energy Storage Program
Credit to Author: Zachary Shahan| Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:03:36 +0000
Published on February 5th, 2020 | by Zachary Shahan
February 5th, 2020 by Zachary Shahan
Electrify America, created as a result of Volkswagen’s years of diesel emissions cheating in the United States, is best known for quickly rolling out a nationwide network of fast and ultra-fast chargers for electric vehicle drivers (mostly at Walmarts). That part of the company is a true boon to non-Tesla electric vehicle (EV) drivers, since it makes road trips in other electric vehicles genuinely practical and fairly convenient (and also assists electric taxi or ride-hailing services like Lyft), even if it’s not as ideal as the Tesla Supercharger network (in various ways) and a bit more expensive.
However, Electrify America goes beyond the charging infrastructure. For example, it also produces and runs national advertisements for EV adoption, and it is rolling out “slow”/destination EV chargers across the country. Now there’s also news of an Electrify America investment in a stationary storage program in Sacramento, California.
The thing is, EV fast charging pulls down a lot of power, sucking electricity out of the grid very quickly. Typically, that kind of high-power activity presents challenges for the grid and thus comes with hearty peak power charges, “demand charges.” Up to 80% of an Electrify America electric bill can be demand charges. One solution implemented by Electrify America in some cases has been installing Tesla Powerpacks at some locations. (Perhaps using Powerpacks or perhaps using other stationary energy storage units, other EV fast charging networks — like Greenway, Fastned, EVgo, and Tesla’s Supercharger network — have done the same.)
In Sacramento — as part of a deal with the local utility, Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) — Electrify America is putting $1.3 million into SMUD’s Energy StorageShares program.
“This first-of-a-kind program will help address peak energy demands, minimize impacts to the grid and support the expansion of EV charging in our community,” said SMUD CEO and General Manager Arlen Orchard. “A program like this also continues to move us toward a carbon free economy by enabling higher levels of renewable generation to be integrated with the grid.” By helping to lower its impact on the SMUD grid, this investment is also cutting Electrify America’s energy costs, which will presumably be passed on to customers via lower prices.
“The program incentivizes placement of energy storage in grid-stressed locations in Sacramento while providing Electrify America with potential reductions in demand charges for its SMUD service territory-located sites. SMUD plans to site the utility battery in a location where significant load growth is expected over the next five years.” Electrify America currently has 12 charging stations in the SMUD territory.
This investment is part of Electrify America’s Sacramento-area Green City Initiative. Here are more of Electrify America’s investments in this initiative:
Photo by Cynthia Shahan | CleanTechnica
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Zachary Shahan is tryin’ to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA] — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in this company and feels like it is a good cleantech company to invest in. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort on Tesla or any other company.