CORNELIUS – A high school in the Northeastern US planned to reduce their energy costs and maximize the benefits of their existing 15kW solar array by implementing a battery storage system. A significant part of the school’s electricity bill is based on the highest 15-minute period of peak usage during a billing cycle. This period may not coincide with peak solar generation. To shave down their building loads on the utility grid, they need to effectively balance their three power sources – the grid, their solar, and their battery.
The company who engineered and constructed the school’s solar array and the energy storage system designers and installers enlisted the services of Solar Operations Solutions (Solar-Ops) to integrate the real time management of the grid, solar, and battery. The solution provides monitoring of the load and the distributed energy resource availability, as well as the capability to shift to stored energy as needed while adjusting for seasonal and daily variables.
Using their myPV IQ intelligent platform, Solar-Ops implemented a dedicated monitoring and solar + storage control system for the school. Through a user-friendly dashboard, the viewer can remotely monitor the billing meter of the utility, solar generation, and the availability of stored energy, as well as access the dedicated battery controller, see historical data, and view an editable battery schedule. The scheduling tile enables pre-determined charging and discharging based on demand forecast which can be defined up to a year in advance. The myPV IQ system monitors usage and solar generation, and based on set thresholds, automatically adjusts energy consumption from the utility by supplementing with available stored energy.
“We see a rapidly growing demand for utility-grade monitoring and control requirements at small commercial scale installations like this project. The myPV product line is designed to serve this market directly with proven and affordable turnkey solutions to enable the transition to renewable energy for everyone,” said Brad Micallef, President of Solar-Ops.
All of Solar-Ops’ myPV products (hardware and software) are modular, configuration-based, and support open protocols. These features allow them to be deployed quickly and integrated immediately. At the school, the myPV IQ monitoring and control platform was deployed in the myPV STORAGE product – a small enclosure simply integrated into the institution’s battery container. By residing on site, it provides secure data logging without communication interruptions and does not incur cloud-data access fees for real-time control of energy storage. Plus, myPV IQ is extensible should the school’s monitoring and control needs change.
