sonnen has rolled out sonnenCommunity New York Virtual Power Plant (VPP), a solar-plus-battery program for homeowners in New York state. sonnen will be the exclusive hardware and software provider for the program, offering clean energy at a discounted rate to 200 homes in Westchester County, N.Y. in an initial pilot phase.
Sustainable Westchester, a nonprofit administering the Westchester Power Program and the largest community choice aggregator (CCA) in New York, will act as a premier partner for this project, working with sonnen and local solar contractors to build a dispatchable grid asset that will provide homeowners with resilient backup power and generate revenue.
Quest Solar and SunBlue Energy, two regional contractors and installation partners, will take the lead in implementing this program locally, pursuing new and retrofit sales of rooftop solar and sonnen ecoLinx systems among eligible homeowners throughout Westchester County.
“We understand that stand-alone residential solar is not sufficient – a distributed, modernized grid requires controllable, intelligent batteries paired with solar. What’s more, VPPs are invaluable resources that can replace the dirtiest ‘peaker’ power plants with local renewable energy,” says Michel Delafontaine, director of business development at Sustainable Westchester. “We’re able to deploy our knowledge of regional markets and municipal programs, as well as our connections with local leadership, to implement an innovative solution from sonnen.”
With sonnen’s innovative VPP software platform, Logical Buildings (a third-party scheduling coordinator and aggregator) can dispatch the planned 80 MWh of ecoLinx batteries in the sonnenCommunity NY VPP for dynamic participation and revenue generation in the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) market. Forming a dynamic grid asset, batteries enrolled in the program can also provide demand response services to the local utility, ConEdison, including solar time shifting, reduced demand for peaking resources and grid decongestion during peak periods.
Based on the outcomes of the initial pilot with Sustainable Westchester, sonnen hopes to expand the project footprint into several Long Island communities through a partnership with similar programs under development. The goal is to bring 5,000 new solar+storage units per quarter online in the sonnenCommunity NY VPP by 2024.
Sonnen has deployed similar solar+storage models in Utah, California, Arizona and Florida.
