A new rental development in Salt Lake City is the first to put a storage battery connected to rooftop solar in each unit, creating a virtual power plant, Fast Company reports.
“This is the kind of community that’s truly a community of the future, where solar and solar batteries are literally built into your life,” says Blake Richetta, chairman and CEO of Sonnen, Inc., the company that makes the batteries used in the project, called Soleil Lofts, built by the developer Wasatch Group. Sonnen has previously installed batteries to store solar power in groups of single-family homes in the U.S., but this will be the first time that those batteries will be controlled by a utility. That means that the utility can manage the system to avoid using a fossil fuel-powered “peaker plant” when energy demand is highest.
“When there’s excess solar-generated energy produced, instead of just pushing it into the grid right away, it’s going to be shifted and harnessed in the batteries,” Richetta says. “Rocky Mountain Power will look at that in real time, and every day will constantly be able to say, okay, when can we use this solar?” Right now, in areas with a lot of solar power, there’s often so much energy produced when the sun is out that it can’t be used; without battery storage, when power is needed at night, utilities have to turn to more polluting sources.
The developers made a deliberate choice to put each of the 600 batteries inside apartments rather than in an unseen utility room. As a practical matter, it’s more efficient to send electrons from apartment to apartment. But the choice was mostly a statement to residents. “We wanted to be able to demonstrate [the impact of the project] in a way that people can say, ‘Hey, I’m proud to take the pledge to live differently for the betterment of the overall society,'” says Johnson.
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