Technology group Wärtsilä has been selected by US utility Duke Energy for the engineering, procurement and construction of three battery energy storage facilities.
The projects will be located in North Carolina and Indiana in the United States.
The projects include:
Duke Energy’s Asheville (8.8MW/8.8MWh)
Hot Springs (4MW/4MWh with 3MWdc/2MWacMW solar generating system)
Crane (4.95 MW/5 MWh) project in Indiana.
The energy storage plants in North Carolina are part of the utility’s $2 billion grid modernisation initiative.
The three storage project sites are expected to be commissioned during 2020 and 2021.
Wärtsilä will also provide its advanced energy management platform for deployment across the utility’s existing and planned battery storage sites and solar assets across six energy distribution areas.
The solution will enable real-time control and protection of the plants, revenue stacking and fleet visibility capabilities.
The platform will allow the North Carolina facilities to dispatch energy, provide emergency backup power, and balance the local grid, while also introducing more clean energy into Duke Energy’s service territory.
Andrew Tang, vice president, energy storage and optimisation at Wärtsilä Energy, said: “Duke Energy is specifically utilising the GEMS Fleet Director and GEMS Power Plant Controller to monitor, assess and optimize deployments across multiple regions in real-time and integrating GEMS as a data source for their specialised algorithms and analytics. GEMS will be customised for Duke Energy’s deployments to increase grid resilience at sites that require energy storage backup and to ultimately facilitate the first-ever entry into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator market.”
