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Monetize Your Energy Storage Asset – Demystifying How Acumen EMS™ Reliably Dispatches to Achieve Optimal Financial Returns

We are publishing a whitepaper to bring more transparency into how our Acumen EMS™ energy storage controls software operates and maximizes economic value capture. This paper is intended for solar and storage developers and host customers considering deploying storage in a behind-the-meter (BTM) setting. By demystifying how an energy management system (EMS) optimizes the dispatch of an energy storage system (ESS), we aim to make storage less abstract and more tangible. To that end, this paper includes sections on:

  • Technical concepts related to EMS software, including field operational algorithms and perfect foresight algorithms
  • Use cases for common types of Acumen EMS field deployments
  • Fleet-level statistics and site-level annualized results for Acumen EMS deployments
  • Lessons learned from commissioning and operating a fleet of systems

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DOWNLOAD FULL WHITEPAPER PDF HERE

We have a lot of learnings to share

In September of 2019, Energy Toolbase merged with Pason Power, which had been developing EMS controls technology since 2016. After merging and uniting forces under one brand, our energy storage controls business has matured significantly. Our product and engineering teams have delivered a series of updates to unify further our suite of software products: ETB Developer, Acumen EMS™, and ETB Monitor. Our sales team has more than quadrupled the number of contracted Acumen EMS deployments and grown our pipeline of future projects by an even larger magnitude. Our engineering teams have integrated our Acumen EMS controls with a dozen ESS hardware vendors, including Tier 1 providers such as BYD, Delta, and Socomec. Our operations and support teams have scaled up and created processes to support our growing fleet of projects.

Along the way, we have learned many important lessons firsthand, which we share throughout this paper. While our storage business and the broader market have matured considerably, we still have a long way to go. Daily, our teams work through challenges our customers face in system design, utility rate and incentive program requests, equipment sourcing, permitting and interconnection, commissioning, and ongoing operation. As we work through issues, we continue to share and apply our learnings internally and externally.

Our commitment to transparency

Transparency has been a core value at Energy Toolbase since our company’s founding in 2014. We attribute a lot of the success of our ETB Developer product, our industry-leading sales and modeling platform, to our steadfast transparent and objective nature. We have created trust with solar + storage developers in the “pre-sales” process by giving them complete visibility and clarity into how we calculate bill savings and project economics. We are now working to bring this same level of transparency “post-sale” to our energy storage controls software. On a project-level basis, we do this with our ETB Monitor platform, which gives developers and host customers complete visibility into how their systems operate and how much bill savings are being captured each month. Furthermore, now that we have a rapidly growing fleet of operational projects, we intend to regularly publish Acumen EMS performance reports like the one included in this paper. By being open and honest about our successes, our failures, and our learnings, we hope to continue gaining the trust of developers and host customers. Watch our Acumen EMS product video here