Recently, Avista was awarded a grant from the Washington Department of Commerce and Governor Jay Inslee’s Clean Energy Fund 2 to demonstrate how a Shared Energy Economy can benefit Washington energy consumers. The grant is the latest example of Avista’s 127-year history of innovation and positions the utility for the energy future.
Over the years, Avista has learned a lot about how to integrate intermittent renewable energy into the electrical grid from Avista’s Energy Storage Project in Pullman, which was funded by Avista with assistance from a grant from the Clean Energy Fund 1 in 2014. Thanks to the grant from the Clean Energy Fund 2, Avista, with its partners, will build upon these learnings and take the next step by piloting a Shared Energy Economy model.
Avista’s vision of a Shared Energy Economy allows energy assets, including distributed energy resources like residential solar panels and battery storage, along with traditional large-scale utility generation assets, to be shared and leveraged for multiple purposes. In this model, both the customer and utility can benefit.
Avista’s partners in this endeavor include, UniEnergy Technologies (battery storage manufacturer), McKinstry, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, the U.S. Department of Energy, Washington State University and technology partner Itron.
For more information on the pilot, read the news release from Washington Governor Jay Inslee http://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-announces-clean-energy-fund-grid-modernization-grants.