SMA America says it will be offering inverter management functionality to utility clients of EnergyHub, a company that focuses on providing distributed energy resource (DER) solutions.
Utilities can use EnergyHub’s Mercury distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) to deliver mission-critical grid services using SMA commercial and residential inverters through real-time management of essential inverter settings to support distribution network operations. The integration allows utilities to manage natively supported and remotely configurable settings on SMA inverters, including active power, reactive power and ride-through settings.
SMA and EnergyHub are launching the SEP 2.0/IEEE 2030.5 protocol-based integration with Arizona Public Service (APS) to enable the utility’s innovative APS Solar Communities program. APS will use the Mercury DERMS to control SMA inverters at multifamily and commercial-sited solar PV systems throughout its service territory. The integration, which is compliant with California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Electric Rule 21 and the Common Smart Inverter Profile (CSIP), will support key use cases at APS, such as grid stability and excess solar curtailment in response to negative CA-ISO locational marginal prices.
As many utilities face the challenge of daily peak solar generation exceeding peak demand – leading to issues like reverse power flow and negative pricing – the integration between EnergyHub and SMA provides utilities with powerful tools to solve those problems. With this control mechanism in place, customers enjoy reduced energy costs of the SMA solar energy systems while the utility benefits from the increased flexibility of grid-supportive solar energy generation.
“Adding SMA to our roster of DER vendors is a huge win for us and our utility customers, and we’re looking forward to helping utilities get maximum value out of SMA solar systems,” says Seth Frader-Thompson, president and co-founder of EnergyHub.
