Commercial & industrial storage
At commercial scale the battery is the cheap part of the project. What decides whether it pays back is whether the system was sized from the site's actual load profile — and that is a data question, not a product question.
Size from the load profile
The reliable way to size commercial storage is from the site's interval meter data. It answers the questions a capacity request cannot:
- How high are the peaks, and how long do they last?
- How many times a day do they occur?
- What is the total energy that would move through the battery?
- When does the load coincide with the tariff that is being avoided?
Those four answers define the power rating, the energy capacity and the daily cycle. Everything else — cooling, enclosure, protection — follows from them.
What usually decides payback
Honestly, it is rarely the battery. The economics of commercial storage usually turn on:
- The tariff structure — how large the demand charge is relative to the energy charge, and how wide the peak-to-off-peak spread is.
- The site's duty cycle — one cycle a day gives a very different return from two.
- The cost of the connection works — where a new transformer or switchgear is required, that cost has to be carried by a system that may be sized for peak shaving alone.
- The service life actually achieved — which depends on thermal design and depth of discharge, and is where an under-specified system quietly loses money.
We will model the case for you and tell you if the numbers do not work. A system that cannot pay back is not a system you should buy, however good the battery is.