How a unique partnership is enabling battery energy storage for municipal utilities in Massachusetts

Lightshift Energy's 10.5 MW BESS in Danville, Virginia has been operational since 2022. Lightshift was recently approved to construct a second BESS in Danville, this one 12 MW. Courtesy: Lightshift Energy

The Paxton Municipal Light Department (PMLD) serves about 2,000 customers in Paxton, Massachusetts, a small town in Worcester County with a delightfully nostalgic website.

The town hall is closed on Fridays, don’t forget.

PMLD is one of 40 municipal utilities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Tiny ones like Paxton can’t always afford to invest in substantial clean energy technology like battery energy storage systems (BESS), but does that mean the people who live there should be left behind in the clean energy transition while increasing grid demands strain their resilience?

Not if Lightshift Energy and the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) have something to say about it.

A first-of-its-kind partnership

MMWEC is the designated joint action agency for munis in Massachusetts, serving 20 municipal utility members and all 40 municipal utilities as project participants. Back in 2022, following a competitive solicitation process, MMWEC selected Lightshift as its exclusive partner in a first-of-its-kind plan to deploy the state’s first jointly implemented fleet of grid-scale battery energy storage systems.

Lightshift is now constructing up to 50 megawatts (MW) across MMWEC territories, making an impact one community at a time. By the time they’re finished, the developer estimates a total cost savings of more than $200 million for MMWEC’s customers.

A crane lowers a Lightshift battery energy storage container into place. Courtesy: Lightshift Energy

“I am beaming with pride over these projects,” gushes Rory Jones, cofounder of Lightshift and a Massachusetts native. “It’s been a few years in the making, and we’re just starting to really see the benefits come to life.”

Cutting ribbons and saving cash

Earlier this month, PMLD and Lightshift hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the battery energy storage project in Paxton. The 3 MW / 9 MWh system uses lithium-ion phosphate batteries from TrinaStorage to reduce grid load during peak events, saving the municipal utility up to $10 million in energy costs while decreasing the Commonwealth’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“For smaller utilities such as Paxton Municipal Light Department, early adoption of new technologies can be cost prohibitive,” says Tara Rondeau, general manager at PMLD. “Thanks to MMWEC’s efforts in establishing a partnership with Lightshift, PMLD is able to utilize battery storage. This will help offset rising capacity and transmission costs for our ratepayers while focusing on cleaner solutions.”

The BESS in Paxton is the fourth in a long series under development. Two were recently commissioned in Groton, Massachusetts, and another in Holden. A fifth project is under construction in Wakefield.

“This is a great example of achieving a lot of efficiency and scale through a centralized procurement entity,” explains Lightshift’s Jones, who recognizes the utility (no pun intended) of applying economies of scale to these projects.

Ratepayers see the benefits too, from their bills to the air they breathe. Jones estimates Paxton’s 2,000 PMLD customers will save $10 million over the 20-year life of the project. That’s a solid chunk of change in a small community, which by nature of its new BESS is also staving off 30,000 tons of CO2.

Municipal utilities in Massachusetts aren’t able to participate in the Commonwealth’s Clean Peak Energy Standard, so the mechanism by which ratepayers save money is a little different, explains Jones.

“It’s shaving peak,” he details. “It’s reducing peak during times when the grid is most stressed, and they’re compensated for that by alleviating that need.”

Lightshift estimates the 5 MW BESS in Holden will save its rate base $30M and provide a net reduction of 50,000 tons of CO2.

Considering the dollars and the (common) sense, Lightshift’s cofounder says these energy storage projects weren’t too difficult to sell to their communities.

“They were welcomed, particularly when accompanied by a narrative that has that type of economic impact,” he offers with a smile. “it’s not typically a controversial technology. It’s fairly non-partisan in nature. And you know that the environmental impact is unequivocally there, but we lead with the economics.”

Rinse, lather, repeat

Although each battery energy storage project comes with unique concerns, the beautiful thing about the arrangement between MMWEC and Lightshift is that it’s easily replicable.

Lightshift’s Jones says his team worked with MMWEC to construct a sort of template for these projects, including legal agreements, power purchase agreements and/or energy storage services agreements, site control licenses, and interconnection agreements.

Lightshift’s BESS in Danville, MA. Courtesy: Lightshift Energy

“Those are all boiler-plated, templated, and agreed to in advance,” Jones shares. “Then you replicate them over and over again, and you reduce all of the administrative and transaction costs associated with that. Those can be really burdensome on a smaller project.”

Jones asserts municipal utilities dramatically improve their buying power under arrangements like this. Instead of procuring the needs of a 2 or 3 MW project, a company can enter large-scale procurement and get the best prices on the market for batteries.

“You’ve worked with an EPC partner, the construction partner, that can build in sequence, serially, and create a lot of efficiencies there,” Jones adds. “So the cost of going in and developing a five-megawatt project on its own is very different from doing a portfolio like this. And there hasn’t been any of that yet in the space. There’s really a trailblazing application here that we’re trying to see replicated in other markets as well.”

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