30%refundable federal credit on commercial solar, storage and heat pumps — what qualifies
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Battery Storage

Storage earns in Ontario for a reason most owners are never told: it is not about the energy, it is about when you draw it.

What storage is actually for

A battery on a commercial site rarely pays for itself by shifting energy prices. It pays by reducing the peak demand your bill is calculated against, and for larger consumers by reducing exposure during the hours that set global adjustment.

That makes storage an interval-data question before it is an equipment question. If nobody has looked at your demand profile, nobody can tell you what a battery is worth on your site.

The three cases

  • Demand charge management. Discharging through your peak hours to shave the monthly demand figure. Predictable, measurable, and the most common commercial case.
  • Peak exposure reduction. For Class A consumers, reducing draw during the hours that set your global adjustment allocation. Higher value, higher forecasting risk.
  • Resilience. Where an outage costs more per hour than the battery costs per month. Cold storage, data, care facilities, process lines.
The credit applies on its own

Battery storage qualifies for the 30% refundable Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit independently — it does not have to be paired with solar to be eligible.

That materially changes the arithmetic on a standalone demand-management installation, and it is the single most commonly missed point in storage proposals.

Sizing

Two numbers matter and they are frequently confused. Power, in kilowatts, is how hard the battery can push — it sets how much demand you can shave. Capacity, in kilowatt-hours, is how long it can keep pushing — it sets whether you get through the whole peak window.

A battery with the right power and the wrong capacity runs out halfway through the peak and saves you almost nothing. We size against your interval data, not against the inverter.

Common questions

Do I need solar to install a battery?

No. Storage qualifies for the federal credit in its own right, and on many commercial sites the demand charge case stands alone without any generation at all.

How do you know what it will save?

From your interval data. Your utility can provide it, and it shows exactly when your peaks occur and how long they last — which is what determines both sizing and saving.

What about backup power?

Storage can provide backup, but a system optimised for daily demand shaving is not automatically configured for islanding. If resilience is a requirement, it changes the design and should be stated at the outset.

Related

Where to go next

Request a quote

Tell us what the building needs.

Send the building type, the approximate size and what prompted the project. You will get a scoped proposal with the incentive position set out line by line — not a number on a page.