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    Forest City—Rockford, Illinois—Welcomes Commissioning of $6.5M Battery Storage-Solar Project with ComEd

    Dec. 10, 2024
    The pilot project in Rockford combines new battery storage with existing customer-owned solar at the Prairie Street Brewing Co. Funded partially through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy (ENERGISE) program, it will enable distribution utility ComEd to research the impacts of distributed energy resource management systems.
    Aerial view of the Prairie Street Brewery Co. solar array. Image credit courtesy ComEd
    Aerial view of the Prairie Street Brewery Co. solar array. Image credit courtesy ComEd

    ComEd, the utility behind the Bronzeville microgrid project in Chicago, is now expanding on a battery storage and solar energy system in Rockford, Illinois.

    The $6.5 million pilot project in Rockford combines new battery storage with existing customer-owned solar at the Prairie Street Brewing Co. Funded partially through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy (ENERGISE) program, it will enable distribution utility ComEd to research the impacts of distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS).

    The pilot, funded by $3.2 million in DOE grant funding and $3.3 million from ComEd and other project partners, will explore the benefits of DERMS to support the integration of private solar panel deployments to grid-connected battery energy storage systems. The results will provide data to support the scalability of similar generation deployments throughout northern Illinois to encourage expanded solar generation and support a more resilient and adaptive power grid.

    "Exploratory projects like this one are crucial to ensuring the grid is fully prepared to support large-scale solar and battery energy storage solutions that are key to the clean energy future in northern Illinois," Gil C. Quiniones, CEO of Exelon-owned ComEd, said in a statement. 

    ComEd recently surpassed 1 GW in distributed solar throughout its service territory.

    The solar panels, owned by the Koch family and located at local Rockford brewery Prairie Street Brewing Company, provide additional power generation for the brewery. ComEd deployed a battery energy storage solution half a mile from the brewery to store power generated from the panels and connect this energy with the community’s grid. The project is also supporting the brewery by increasing the potential of their solar energy generation.

    “The city of Rockford is honored to be home to this solar and battery storage project,” said Thomas P. McNamara, Mayor of Rockford, in a statement. “We are seeing solar deployments grow in Rockford and the surrounding county, and we are excited to collaborate with ComEd to maximize the power of solar deployments in our community to further support our clean energy future.”

    The pilot will test various renewable smoothing techniques, a form of intermittency management, to help ensure the power output of the solar generation is available throughout the day.  Expanding and scaling battery energy storage solutions will support the goals of the state’s Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, which aims to expand solar and other renewables to achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

    The Rockford battery deployment is one of 12 projects throughout the country through the ENERGISE program to explore solar and battery storage solutions. While battery commissioning is scheduled in December 2024, testing of the battery system and solar panels will run through January 2025.

    Rockford, which has close to 150,000 residents, is the fifth largest city in Illinois and the largest outside the Chicago metropolitan area. It is known as “Forest City” for its heavily forested neighborhoods.

    ComEd has spent years developing the wide-ranging microgrid cluster project in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. In May, the utility celebrated the first islanding–or operating the microgrid completely disconnected from the main utility grid–of the Bronzeville Community Microgrid, which serves close to 1,000 customers.

    About the Author

    Rod Walton, EnergyTech Managing Editor | Senior Editor

    For EnergyTech editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].

    Rod Walton has spent 15 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. He formerly was energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World. Later, he spent six years covering the electricity power sector for Pennwell and Clarion Events. He joined Endeavor and EnergyTech in November 2021.

    Walton earned his Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. His career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World. 

    EnergyTech is focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

    He was named Managing Editor for Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech starting July 1, 2023

    Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.

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