What is the cost of an outage? For a Colorado car dealership, the lost business is consequential, so it installed an innovative grid-tied, solar + storage microgrid that today provides a myriad of benefits.
Ehrlich Toyota, a dealership in Greeley, Colorado, experienced between two and four prolonged power outages during business hours each year—interruptions that caused significant financial losses for the company. Intense weather events that include car-damaging hail storms, exacerbated this financial strain by triggering rising insurance rates. So the business contracted IPOWER Alliance to design and install a renewables-based microgrid for resiliency.
“If the power goes out while a customer is ready to make a purchase, the computers are unable to process transactions and business comes to a standstill. And once a customer steps off the lot, they may not return. Having mechanics and service personnel standing around waiting for the power to come back on represents a huge financial loss for the business. The worst part is for the customers who are waiting for a quick oil change to have their cars stuck on a lift,” explained Diane Dandeneau, CEO of IPOWER Alliance, a company that specializes in integrating solar PV, LED lighting, car chargers and resilience solutions.
After initially planning a critical-load battery backup system, Dandeneau’s team discovered that the needed loads were fed by electrical panels all over the building, making that solution practically impossible. The next question was, what about backing up the entire building?
IPOWER Alliance engaged Ageto Energy, who used HOMER Grid software to model a 100% renewable grid-tied system. Together they determined that the most efficient design was a microgrid that integrated a complete LED upgrade, a 368 kW Sunpower solar array on a custom carport with 300-kWac SMA inverters. It also includes a Dynapower 108 kW inverter with 228 kWh lithium-ion Samsung battery storage. The project is managed by the Ageto ACR microgrid controller and Extensible Energy DemandEx for Microgrids to coordinate and optimize the battery and the building load. Oversight and alerts are provided by IPOWER Alliance’s AutoDash, a custom monitoring system.
The dealership can now island power from the utility and run indefinitely during the day on solar and storage, and for several hours without sun. The solar carport further boosts financial resilience by protecting inventory from hail and reducing snow removal costs.
Today, the solar array provides 120% of the dealership’s energy, and the sales and repair departments remain in operation during grid instability. In fact, the dealership recently experienced two power outages on Black Friday—one at 7 am, just as they were opening, and a second at 9 am—and according to Dandeneau, “the batteries kicked in and they sailed right through without an issue.”
The dealership just secured a grant for a DC fast charger. It will soon be able to provide renewable energy to local electric vehicle drivers and will be ready for the new all-electric Toyotas coming to the market.
“We are excited to be able to demonstrate how all these issues can be addressed through our multi-measure solution to provide maximum operational resilience. We couldn’t have understood the opportunity without the use of HOMER Grid,” explained Dandeneau. “We’re pleased that the dealership can now stay up and running when there’s a power disruption, and more importantly that they can continue to serve their customers.”
UL Solutions HOMER Grid is a market-leading solar-plus-storage software tool for designing grid-tied distributed energy systems. With an integrated utility tariff database and a new module for electric vehicle charging stations, it optimizes peak shaving to help commercial and industrial utility customers lower their demand charges. HOMER Grid can model projects with wind and combined heat and power as well as islanded systems, helping users improve their resiliency. Explore your opportunities with HOMER Grid during a complimentary trial. Learn more and download your complimentary trial.
Hi Francisco,
Thank you for your comment! Let’s hope they are also selling a few Prii. I’m pretty sure they are. And that market is growing by leaps and bounds!
All the best,
Lili
Oh the irony. A renewable energy microgrid for a fossil fuel car dealership…