May. 14, 2024
For commercial and industrial operations, maintaining uninterrupted power can be critical. Data centers and other IT-heavy operations calculate downtime in the tens of thousands of dollars per minute, but for any business an outage is a major disruption with associated costs.
Reliance on a consistent power supply underscores the need for innovative solutions to ensure operational resilience. Distributed energy solutions (DES), also known as distributed energy resources (DER), can help tackle the challenge, offering a defense against unexpected disruptions, and increasingly other benefits, too.
Understanding Distributed Energy Solutions
Distributed energy solutions provide an autonomous power source (e.g., a natural gas or diesel generator, rooftop solar, battery storage), thereby protecting industrial facilities against disruptions on the grid. They may be as simple as a standby power system or they might encompass multiple generation sources, energy storage systems, and sophisticated controls. Regardless of their size and makeup, one key element is the ability to switch from grid to local power without disruption to the facility’s operations.
Some of the most common distributed energy solution components include:
- Microgrid solutions
- Energy storage systems
- Natural gas generators
- Diesel generators
- Wind turbines
- Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems
- Fuel cells
- Electric vehicles (and charging stations)
- Industrial combined heat and power (CHP) systems
Distributed energy solutions offer several benefits to commercial and industrial businesses. Ensuring the continuity of electric service during a grid outage; realizing cost savings by offsetting grid power during peak periods; even creating new sources of revenue—all of these are part of the “value stack.”
Distributed energy solutions offer benefits in three main ways:
- Provide resilience during grid outages: Amid increasing natural disasters and human-induced disruptions, the susceptibility of power grids to outages has put a premium on reliability. Distributed energy solutions meet the challenge head-on by establishing an on-site autonomous power supply that can take over in the event of a grid disturbance. Even highly sensitive operations such as data centers and computer chip fabrication can, with the right equipment, seamlessly transition from grid to local power and back again, ensuring uninterrupted operations.
- Save costs and create revenue: Diversifying sources of supply is a proven way to boost reliability and resilience. In addition, you can facilitate cost savings through switching to local generation during peak periods when industrial time-of-use rates are highest. Surplus energy generated by Distributed energy solutions can, in some areas, be channeled back to the grid to help the grid operator balance their network, a service for which the asset owner is paid by the utility.
- Help foster clean energy initiatives: Relying on solar, wind, and other renewable sources for a portion (or all) of a facility’s power demand displaces power from higher carbon emitting sources. More than simply backup power, these installations—often coupled with energy storage to optimize their performance—can be run in day-to-day operations to reduce the organization’s environmental impact while retaining all of the reliability benefits. In addition, Tier 4 final diesel engines are engineered to drastically reduce exhaust emissions, achieving reductions of up to 99% compared to previous tiers. (Source: Tier 4 Final Diesel Engines: Debunking Myths and Setting the Record Straight | Microgrid Knowledge)
In an energy landscape characterized by increasing uncertainty, it is imperative for businesses to address not only reliability. The sustainability of their power supply is becoming essential regardless of business model or sector. Distributed energy solutions offer a proven, reliable way to meet the reliability challenge while delivering significant economic and environmental benefits.
For enterprises looking to fortify operational resilience through customized solutions, PowerSecure stands as the partner of choice. PowerSecure collaborates with stakeholders to conceptualize and execute energy resilience strategies that address all the issues raised above.