Industrial, Agricultural, and Water Storage Viability and Optimization Website

Background:
California’s industrial, agricultural, and water (IAW) sectors may offer many promising applications for electrical storage, but choosing and operating storage under complex tariff regimes poses a daunting technical (and economic) problem that is likely to discourage potential customers, resulting in lost carbon and economic savings. Vendors offering limited equipment lines are unlikely to provide adequate environmental analysis or unbiased economic results to potential clients, and are even less likely to completely describe the robustness of choices in the face of changing fuel prices and tariffs. Given these considerations, site managers need a place to start in their quest for independent technical and economic guidance on whether storage is even worth the considerable analytic effort.

An open access, web-based electrical storage analysis calculator, therefore, will be designed and presented here to provide economically sound and technology-neutral guidance.

Project summary:
This web based calculator aims to provide IAW facilities with basic guidance on whether available storage technologies of interest merit deeper analysis. Since the IAW sectors encompass a broad range of facilities with fundamentally different characteristics, the tool starts by asking the user to select a load profile from a limited cohort group of example facilities. These examples may be modified by the user to better fit a site’s unique circumstances. After the load profile selection, the user will be prompted to select a tariff, the cost option, and so on, until all of the parameters are specified. Based on the user selections, the solution set will be adjusted to provide ballpark results to the user.

Key features of the tool:
•    It will contain 10 different load profiles for different sites and locations for standard energy use, e.g., winery, cement factory, and industrial manufacturer. These data can be used to perform fast and easy investigations (<10 min). The load profile data may be overwritten with the user’s own site data.
•    It holds the major technology parameters for the major available battery technologies, e.g. regular lead acid batteries or flow batteries. If needed, the parameters may also be overwritten by the user.
•    It will hold a variety of CA tariffs.
•    It delivers an initial optimal investment solution as well as an optimal operating schedule, demonstrates the economic and/or environmental benefits compared to the status quo, and shows the robustness of the solution to uncertain conditions.

Please click here to access the Industrial, Agricultural, and Water Storage Viability and Optimization Website. (Opens new window)