Please make sure that before you add energy storage, you have already completed your design with Inverter & modules. You have also added consumption and pricing. For better understanding of this feature ensure that you have already understood consumption as the storage calculation would depend significantly on consumption.
Let’s get started by understanding how to select your storage goal. The storage feature in Arka360 is designed to help you achieve specific energy goals. You can choose from three main goals:
Bill Savings – Reduce your electricity bill by offsetting peak rates.
Essential Home Backup – Ensure essential appliances remain powered during outages.
Full Home Backup – Provide complete backup for your entire home during outages.
Let's deep dive to understand how to achieve bill savings with the storage feature in Arka360. Bill savings with storage involve offsetting the energy usage during peak rate periods. This feature is available only if you have selected custom Time-Of-Use(ToU) rates or Genability as your utility rates source.
So, before we move ahead with adding battery in the design, Please ensure that in consumption, the post solar utility rate is having TOU rates with different periods.
If you don't have time of use rates, then the self consumption bill saving card will remain disabled.
Now let's get started with addition of battery(storage).
Step 1. Under design section, open the design for which you want to add storage. Choose 'Self Consumption Bill Savings' option in battery card.
Step 2. Clicking on the Self Consumption Bill Savings option will open a popup. Based on the utility rate that you added, Total Peak Offset duration will be selected by default. The total consumption hours and minimum usable battery capacity required will be calculated based on your total peak offset and consumption.
Step 3. Next, we can configure the battery dispatch settings. Here’s how it works:
Time slots (periods) with peak rates(On peak, partial peak and off peak) will be fetched from the TOU rates data and populated on the screen.
You have the flexibility to adjust the energy preference based on when you want to run your loads via battery, solar or grid and when you want to charge your battery via solar or grid. These configurations help optimize the energy usage and reduce costs.
So here you can see during during summer season the on peak period is from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM, during weekdays and weekends. What will happen during this period is the load will run via battery and our battery would get charged from the solar. Same thing would happen during on peak winter season as well. Whatever is the load it will run via battery and battery would get charged from the solar.
Now, during off peak periods, what will happen is our battery would get charged from the grid and our load it will run via Grid.
So these configurations, we will be able to optimize our consumption. Hence, increase the savings using battery and solar.
You can also change the configuration to get the best results that suits your customer requirement. This is just the default configuration that we have given based on your utility provider shared by Genability.
Step 4. Now clicking on 'Next' button will open the next page of pop up in which you can choose the battery.
Step 5. Choose battery manufacturer and model from the list. If the battery that you want to add is not present in the list, contact the customer support team with the datasheet of the required battery. They will get it added.
Step 6. It is preferred to add a slight bigger battery or equivalent in size of the required capacity to offset peak hours. You can click on '+' icon to add a battery of different capacity. For adding the battery capacity of same size you can increase the quantity.
Step 7. Click on calculate savings. It will calculate all values in the cards.
Step 8. Click on 'Save' button to get the battery added in the design.
Yearly grid import in this, the total amount of consumption is being met from grid in a single year.
Yearly grid export here, the total amount of generation it depends on the battery configuration as well. It is the energy sent to the grid from PV and storage in a single year.
Onsite grid independence, it is basically a measure of the load reliance on the renewable energy. It is measured as the percentage of energy consumed directly from solar and storage systems rather than from the grid or utility. So the higher the number, the more reliant you are on renewable energy and the more you save on your electricity bill as you import less power from the grid.
Bill without solar and battery, in this case since we have used genability, this value will directly get fetched from the genability and it is calculated based on the pre solar utility rate and consumption input.
Bill with solar and battery, in this case we have used genability as a source, it will get directly fetched from the genability and it will be calculated based on the post solar utility rate and residual energy.
Lifetime savings from solar and battery, it is calculated based on the data of the bill with and without solar and storage and the escalation rate.
So these are all your overall savings and the different fields which will add a good amount of value to your customer and they will be able to take the right decision.
These outputs would get reflected on the proposal as well that you will be sharing with your clients which will help them make the best decision and hence increase your sales.
The advantages of proper battery dispatch configurations include:
Maximizing savings by using stored energy during peak rate periods.
Reducing dependency on the grid by charging the battery with solar energy.
Enhancing energy efficiency and sustainability.