The New York Power Authority (NYPA) yesterday announced hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for energy storage, demand management, microgrids, electric vehicle charging and other distributed energy resources.
NYPA made the announcement following a board of trustees’ vote to approve its 2019 budget.
The budget includes $250 million for grid flexibility that will help fund up to 150 MW in projects, largely energy storage and demand management. NYPA will seek demonstrations by utilities and municipal electric cooperatives, as well public and private partnerships as it identifies initial project locations.
“Our primary intent is to use the experiences gained from test-and-learn projects to provide value to customers,” said Gil C. Quiniones, NYPA’s president and CEO. “At the same time, we can demonstrate to regulators and market participants the ways in which these flexibility tools increase the efficiency of the grid, and inform the process of creating mechanisms that enable private markets to invest in them at scale.”
The authority designated $5 million to jump-start innovative clean energy projects through December 31, 2025 under the Clean Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Grant Program. The money will supplement such technologies as microgrids, solar PV, solar plus battery storage, standalone storage and smart inverter functionality. Each project will include software technology that feeds into the authority’s energy manager system, which monitors energy performance and efficiency of government buildings.
NYPA has set a goal to become the first all-digital utility in North America. To accelerate the transformation, the authority will spend $81.7 million to expand installation of thousands of sensors to monitor its 16 generating facilities and 1,400 circuit-miles of transmission lines. In addition, the authority plans to modernize its communications infrastructure to make it more reliable and secure.
The budget also funds EVolve NY, a seven-year, $250 million electric vehicle charging program.
The authority’s investments are part of a larger state effort to install 1,500 MW of energy storage by 2025 — what NYPA says equals the electricity demand of one-fifth of all New York homes — and make renewables 50 percent of electric supply by 2030.
NYPA is the largest state public power organization in the nation.
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