Peak Shaving
Energy load leveling is a term used to describe a method for reducing fluctuations in energy supply caused by changing demand. Utilities keep spinning reserve on their grid to balance periods of high demand and fluctuating loads. This spinning reserve is essential to prevent power intermittencies including voltage and frequency irregularities and is often called upon in a rapid fashion.
Historically, a natural gas turbine or other fast-reacting thermal generation asset was used for spinning reserve or as a peaking asset. Today, battery energy storage systems (BESS) are ideally suited to, supply the peaks of a varying load or, remove the need of bringing online a new generating source to cover the short-term demand. Often a BESS, peak shaving asset will eliminate the need to install additional slow-reacting and costly thermal spinning reserve capacity.
In addition to providing other valuable grid services, microgrids and BESS are ideally suited to serve as peak shaving assets as they can be both commanded and coordinated to peak shave at a local or extended grid level.