In Central Florida, the Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) is making strides toward a future where renewable energy sources, like solar, will take center stage. As the utility works to create a reliable, resilient and decarbonized grid for its quarter of a million customers, pilot tests of emerging technologies are leading the way.
In 2023, OUC commemorated its hundredth year of service in Central Florida. Now, as we look ahead to the next 100 years, our utility is preparing to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s customers: charting a path to clean energy, prioritizing renewable alternatives and achieving Net Zero CO2 emissions by the year 2050, as well as interim targets of 50% emissions reduction by 2030 and 75% reduction by 2040.
Solar is a key component of this plan. In the next year, OUC will more than double its utility solar capacity with two new 74.5 MW solar farms under construction in Osceola County, each comprised of nearly 300,000 panels that track the sun throughout the day for maximum power generation. Once these projects are completed, OUC’s collective utility solar energy capacity will reach 274 MW, enough to power approximately 50,000 Florida homes.
The utility is exploring ways to make solar more efficient. Researchers at the Grid Integration Lab at the Gardenia Innovation & Operations Center study tools and technology, including floating and bifacial rooftop arrays, which will be critical as OUC moves toward a decarbonized – and ultimately, decentralized – grid.
After early trials of floating solar at the Gardenia facility met with strong results, OUC launched partnerships to bring the technology to the wider community, including a 19,350-sq.-ft. floating array near Orlando International Airport’s new Terminal C. Later this year, the utility will expand on that success with its largest ever floating installation: a 2 MW array located atop a Florida Department of Transportation retention pond in Orlando.
Adopting more solar, however, is only one part of the challenge. To achieve our goals, we also need to integrate that solar into the grid in a way that ensures our more than 250,000 customers retain access to the reliable and affordable electricity they need.
Bringing Storage to the Grid for Added Resiliency
While many refer to Florida as the “Sunshine State,” in reality, it’s the “partly cloudy state,” with roughly 277 cloudy days in Orlando per year. As a result, solar energy generation only fully runs for about five to eight hours a day, depending on the time of year and weather conditions. On rainy days, clouds can cause solar production to drop around 70% in a matter of just minutes.
Current battery technology isn’t enough to make 24-hour solar power feasible, but it can extend solar power into the night. Every hour we can use the sun to light up the night powers our quest to increase the overall percentage of solar in Central Florida’s portfolio.
Implementing the technology needed to reach that benchmark, however, can come with a significant level of risk. As an established utility, OUC relies on small-scale pilots of emerging technologies at the Grid Integration Lab, where research teams gather information that will support grid resiliency, ascertain the project’s economic feasibility, and minimize the practical and financial risk for our customers as we move to more consequential real-world testing.
The latest success story from the Grid Integration Lab is the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), a $5 million pilot installation that will incorporate a fully functional 4MW/8MWh large-scale energy storage battery substation in east St. Cloud.
Developed through two years of preliminary research and battery testing under controlled conditions, BESS represents a critical step toward tackling solar intermittency challenges. While small-scale pilots can provide a wealth of information about battery capacity and control, only practical utility-scale testing can help utilities understand key details of design, location and operation needed to serve our customers down the road.
Although BESS is OUC’s largest foray into real-world battery testing so far, it’s not the only one. Another recent site is our 4Roots Microgrid, being built by OUC in collaboration with John Rivers, founder and CEO of 4Roots and 4Rivers Restaurant Group. Continuing 4Roots’ mission to unearth the power of food to build healthy communities, the microgrid will feature EV charging, batteries, floating solar and other tools currently being tested, and will allow OUC to offer backup power to EV customers in the event of a hurricane or outage.
To determine future viability, OUC is testing storage solutions with cutting-edge technologies like Vanadium Flow Batteries and flywheels. Flow batteries provide longer duration storage than traditional batteries allowing OUC to shift more solar power into the night while flywheels help smooth solar energy to ensure clouds don’t impact our customers' power quality. Soon, in partnership with the University of Central Florida and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, OUC will add hydrogen technologies to the lab to better understand how the most abundant element in our universe can enable our path to cleaner energy and cleaner roads.
Electric Vehicles Drive Value for the Grid
Advanced charger technology will play a role in OUC’s plan for a more resilient grid. Unlike the traditional EV charging model where energy moves in one direction from the grid to a charging vehicle, OUC’s newest technologies can push energy from batteries back to the grid and decentralize storage, providing more flexibility in emergencies, storms and outages.
Currently, OUC is testing the XCharge battery-integrated charging station, which combines DC fast charging with a built-in lithium-ion battery. Not only can the charger’s bilateral battery supply the bulk of power needed to charge an EV even when the grid is down, but it can also store solar energy to use at night and return stored energy to the grid if needed. After an initial testing phase at the Grid Integration Lab, the utility aims to strategically leverage this technology throughout its service territory. A key advantage of this technology is its ability to work independently of the grid, which means it can be deployed in rural areas as well as along hurricane evacuation routes. OUC also is partnering with the vendor to expand this solution by developing Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) capabilities, not only advancing OUC’s goals but advancing our industry.
V2G chargers allow the battery in the car to power the grid, unlocking value for our customers with and without electric vehicles. This turns every electric vehicle in Orlando into a grid battery that is five times the size of a Tesla battery. As OUC’s clean energy portfolio continues to grow, distributed storage is essential for grid stability, and V2G chargers are an adaptable technology that can make EV ownership and a clean energy future more feasible.
Although the simultaneous shift toward solar and EV adoption poses new challenges for grid resilience, it also offers an opportunity. By studying and testing services and emerging technologies to support this transition, OUC is redefining the relationship between municipal utilities and the communities they serve.
Cloud Mapping and Predictive Technology
OUC’s battery storage and electric vehicle programs are only one strategy for mitigating intermittency and balancing supply. Another essential element is information: predictive data that allows OUC to anticipate and respond to upcoming changes in solar production or electricity demand.
In 2020, OUC teamed up with UCF engineering students to study cloud mapping technology to enhance system resiliency on partly cloudy days. The Cloud Impact Mapping System (CIMS) prototype tracks cloud movements over solar farms and monitors potential fluctuations in solar power. Using that data, the utility can switch to an alternative form of generation (such as natural gas peakers at OUC’s Osceola Generating Station in Osceola County) before solar generation declines, preventing impacts to electric service.
The CIMS prototype is a strong starting point for gathering predictive data about solar supply, but further research is needed before it can be implemented on the grid. Earlier this year, OUC embarked on a third partnership for this project – this time with advanced researchers and UCF professors to refine the product and determine how best to integrate it into the utility’s wider operations. CIMS in combination with OUC’s fleet of weather stations will provide operational understanding of how to use OUC’s batteries and other storage solutions.
Partnering to Manage Electric Demand
To ensure grid reliability, we need to consider not only fluctuations in energy supply through battery storage and cloud mapping, but also factors that impact demand. As a utility, OUC is responsible for gauging how our customers use electricity, when they need to use it, and how much they need to use – and, from there, hitting the right balance to provide clean, reliable energy.
In the short term, devices like smart meters can increase OUC’s understanding of customer energy usage on an hour-by-hour basis, especially as we strive to manage demand at peak hours. Customers can access a dashboard that allows them to monitor their own electric usage and adjust habits to save on bills, effectively reducing demand during peak hours such as hot summer afternoons or cold winter mornings. Making usage data more visible to consumers encourages households to shift some of their electric consumption to low-demand hours: for example, charging EVs or running pool pumps late at night. Over the long term, we also need to plan for new loads that our grid will need to manage, whether that increase is caused by natural population growth or economic development.
Additionally, the energy landscape is changing. Our customers have more choices beyond the basic utility services provided in the past, and steadily growing technologies like vehicle electrification, rooftop solar and battery walls are changing the way many households consume – and produce – electricity. By building those elements into our plan for the years ahead, OUC can approach change not as a challenge, but as an opportunity.
Ultimately, OUC’s aim is to make solar as reliable as other forms of current electric generation. That starts by minimizing the element of unpredictability – using weather data and cloud mapping to look into the future and predict loads, partnering with customers to smooth their load, and then using tools like battery storage to respond to and protect our grid from factors we don’t control. Only by using a cohesive network of different technologies can we make solar reliable in the long term.
A Bright Future for Florida
Partly cloudy though it can be, Florida is the Sunshine State. With large expanses of flat land and open waterways ideal for solar arrays and plenty of daylight hours even in winter, the state is far better suited to solar power than it is to other renewable energy sources like wind or geothermal. As OUC works to achieve our net zero goals over the coming decades, solar remains a critical option for a cleaner generation portfolio and a more sustainable future.
That future is in sight, and OUC’s task is to shorten the time needed to reach the finish line. That’s why exploring emerging technologies is not only an important element of our plan, but an essential one. Through targeted testing with small-pilot programs, we can evaluate the efficacy of the options available, understand how to manage the cost most effectively, and ensure grid resiliency for the years ahead.