36 Energy Storage Sanjana Paul Technology Overview The proposed technology is a battery energy storage system (BESS), with a possibility of incorporating EV charging configurations for MIT’s fleet of campus vehicles under different campus decarbonization pathways. BESSs are designed to store electrical energy from one or more sources for later use. They can deliver electric power in Watts, and potential thermal energy savings through efficient energy management. BESS technology is already commercially available, with deployments across the globe, including in similar use cases across college campuses in the United States. To make best of use of this technology, deployment of BESSs on MIT campus will require a detailed assessment of past, current, and future projected energy use and needs, solar and/or other on-campus renewable energy production potential, and a spatial evaluation of suitable locations to install one or more systems, as BESSs are highly context-dependent. The key assumptions we made in undertaking a study on deploying this technology on campus are that the presence of BESSs on campus are a feasible technology to help MIT reduce its carbon emissions through storing renewable and low-carbon electricity, and through better energy management. For the same conditions, we assume that BESSs will contribute to cost savings over time. Risk and Innovation Regarding reputational risk, deploying BESS at MIT is minimal - in fact, it may be a reputational benefit, with not pursuing many sustainable technologies being a bigger reputational risk. Several other universities that have deployed BESSs on campus, including the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the University of California Riverside, have touted their new infrastructure as evidence of their status as innovative, forwardthinking universities contributing to the vast amount of work that must be done to combat climate change. The Illinois Institute of Technology and University of California Riverside further use their BESS infrastructure (which are part of microgrid configurations) as teaching and research tools. This approach aligns strongly with the MIT Office of Sustainability’s mandate to use the campus as a testbed for research and action. Regarding risk in the form of campus disruption, depending on the configuration of the BESS(s), there may not be any need to evacuate buildings, although certain outdoor or facilities areas may be off limits. Lastly, from a financial risk perspective, while some BESS configurations are more costly than others, the increasing amount of incentive programs for clean energy solutions deployment, as well as the falling costs of clean energy technologies and the numerous examples of BESS deployment make the systems low-risk to implement if they are determined by stakeholders to be the right decision for the campus.
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