Battery storage
The line item on your bill that deserves a second look.
Demand charges are typically billed on your single highest 15-minute interval each month, not on how much power you use. Storage is designed to lower that one number.
Demand charges are typically billed on your single highest 15-minute interval each month, not on how much power you use. Storage is designed to lower that one number.
Every commercial electric bill splits into two charges: energy, based on total consumption, and demand, based on the single highest moment of draw in the billing period. Storage is one of the few approaches that can lower the second one without changing how the property operates.
Your meter records average load in short intervals — typically 15 minutes — around the clock. The utility takes the single highest interval of the month and multiplies it by a per-kW rate. That one number can make up a large share of the total electric bill, depending on the tariff.
The system charges during low-demand hours and discharges when the building's load rises toward its usual peak, so the meter records a smaller number. In most cases, equipment, schedules, and tenant operations don't have to change.
Many commercial tariffs carry a demand ratchet: a single bad month can set a billing floor for up to eleven months after it. One properly shaved peak can protect nearly a full year of bills, not just one.
Keep scrolling: a day of building load, the 15-minute spike that sets the demand charge, and what the meter records once storage discharges into that peak.
Storage equipment is capital-intensive, and the federal tax benefits attached to it are large relative to most property owners' tax positions. Institutional capital partners are structured to use those benefits directly, which is what makes third-party-financed storage possible. Whether a specific project is financed depends on the site and the partner's underwriting.
Standalone battery storage can qualify for the Section 48E investment tax credit of up to 30%, subject to eligibility requirements, with adders available for domestic content and project siting — a credit that has stayed in place for storage even as other clean-energy incentives have phased down.
Alongside the credit, the system's cost basis can typically be depreciated on an accelerated schedule, compounding the tax benefit in the early years of the asset's life.
Some states run storage programs — Connecticut's Energy Storage Solutions is one example — that layer enrollment and performance payments on top of the federal credit, tied to the system discharging during utility-called grid events.
Two things determine whether storage pencils: how large the peak is, and how spiky the building's load is against its average.
Flat, always-on buildings — hospitals, data centers, some senior living facilities — are the harder case, even at large scale. We'll tell you plainly if a property isn't a fit rather than force a deal that doesn't work.
That's the entire ask at this stage. We pull your rate schedule and read the demand determinants against your actual tariff rather than an assumption.
We analyze the peak events — magnitude, duration, and recurrence — then solve for power and energy, and come back with a sized system and a modeled savings figure. No charge for the analysis, nothing to sign.
Qualified projects go to our investment partners. We negotiate the hosting agreement and handle the interconnection application and permitting.
Licensed contractors install and interconnect the system. Once commissioned, the controller runs automatically — monitoring load, shaving peaks, and dispatching into utility-called events where programs allow.
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