Duke Vitality has positioned into service one of many nation’s most superior inexperienced microgrids within the Madison County city of Scorching Springs, North Carolina.
The Scorching Springs microgrid consists of a 2 MWac photo voltaic facility and a 4.4 MW lithium-based battery storage facility. The microgrid not solely supplies an economical and dependable grid resolution for serving the Scorching Springs space, however it would additionally present power and extra bulk system advantages for all prospects.
It will embrace reliability companies to the electrical grid, equivalent to frequency and voltage regulation and ramping assist and capability throughout system peaks.
“Duke Vitality has quite a few smaller microgrids on our system, however that is our first microgrid that may energy a whole small city if its essential energy line experiences an outage,” mentioned Jason Handley, common supervisor, Distributed Vitality Group, Duke Vitality.
Scorching Springs, with a inhabitants of a bit of greater than 500, has restricted rerouting choices ought to an outage happen. Throughout its testing part, Duke Vitality’s microgrid was in a position to choose up the city’s total load from a black begin with none assist from the power grid, utilizing solely the photo voltaic and battery storage to revive energy. The microgrid served the city’s load whereas the corporate gathered information.
“By way of power storage and microgrids, Duke Vitality can allow the combination of extra renewables onto the grid and assist enhance reliability whereas protecting prices reasonably priced for purchasers and the communities we serve,” Handley added.
Duke Vitality labored with the know-how firm Wärtsilä, which equipped the battery power storage system (BESS) for the challenge. The microgrid makes use of Wärtsilä’s GEMS Digital Vitality Platform as its power administration system, for built-in management of each the photo voltaic and power storage services.
“The Scorching Springs inverter-only-based group microgrid is a good step ahead for Duke Vitality and our prospects. This challenge has diminished the necessity for tools upgrades in an environmentally delicate space,” Handley mentioned. “We’re utilizing classes realized from this first-of-its-kind set up to take to our different microgrids underneath development in Indiana and Florida. At a bigger scale, microgrids deliver extra resiliency to the power grid for our prospects.”
Duke Vitality has been energetic with microgrids and battery storage, with greater than 60 MW related all through its regulated areas. In Asheville, North Carolina, the corporate operates a 9 MW lithium-ion battery system at a substation website within the Rock Hill group, close to Sweeten Creek Street. In Haywood County, the corporate has a 3.8 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery and 10 kW photo voltaic DC microgrid set up serving a communications tower on Mount Sterling within the Smoky Mountains Nationwide Park.
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