A FlexGen battery project in Texas. Image: FlexGen.
FlexGen Power Systems will deploy 10 battery energy storage systems (BESS) for electric cooperatives in North Carolina, the energy storage technology provider and systems integrator’s home state.
The systems, adding up to 40MW in total, will each be deployed for a different not-for-profit cooperative group and most will be in rural areas of the southern US state.
The deal has been signed with the group North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives, which represents the state’s 26 cooperative groups and their million customers in 93 counties.
The battery systems will be charged during periods of low electricity demand and discharged when demand peaks and is more expensive — and often more fossil fuel and carbon intensive. North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives said the batteries will increase reliability of the electricity suppliers’ networks and lower electricity and running costs.
The fuel mix across the group’s 26 cooperatives is already at 60% carbon-free and less than 5% of their power comes from coal. In addition to nuclear and gas, the group is pursuing newer technologies like community solar, microgrids, smart thermostats, EV chargers and now battery storage.
It is seeking to coordinate these distributed resources across an energy management platform, including FlexGen’s battery systems, each of which will be installed at a cooperative’s substation. The batteries will be a powerful complement to the integration of distributed energy resources (DER), giving the coops more flexibility to monitor and coordinate their use and dispatch.
FlexGen will engineer and construct the battery installations, beginning early this year. The systems will start to come online this summer.
In an Energy-Storage.news interview late last year, FlexGen CEO Kelcey Pegler talked about various aspects of the company’s business model and its offerings, including the software which drives both the battery systems themselves and their interaction with other resources in a network or project setting.
That interview took place shortly after FlexGen’s selection by clean energy company Ameresco to deploy 2.1GWh of battery storage in California utility Southern California Edison’s service area.
