When will AEP and other utilities include the community energy storage concept in their planning and commercial deployment?
AN. When we started with the NaS battery in 2005, we went after that as an R&D project and installed it. It was operational in 2006. In 2007, our planning people ordered six more megawatts and our transmission ordered another four megawatts. They did that on their own. In other words, they bought into it. Once the storage is functional, they see the value. They pick it up. Planning departments have picked it up. When you look at other utilities, a lot of them look at the storage as an R&D thing. Just put it in the lab and see what happens. What AEP did was say, “We’ll go right to the field. We’ll put it on the real circuit serving real people.” And we saw the results. Planning bought into it within a year because planning goes in a yearly cycle. From this experience we say that once it’s on the ground and people see that, it just goes by the cycle of the planning. Another factor to consider is when it comes to big storage like a substation, it takes a lot of high-level management decis
