Technology group Wärtsilä has contracted with Duke Energy, one of the largest electric power holding companies in the United States, for the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) of three battery storage facilities during the past six months. These facilities will be located in North Carolina and Indiana in the United States.Additionally, Wärtsilä’s GEMS advanced energy management platform will be deployed across the utility’s existing and planned battery storage sites and solar assets across six energy distribution areas. The latest order was booked with Wärtsilä in March.

The projects include Duke Energy’s Asheville (8.8MW/8.8MWh) and Hot Springs (4MW/4MWh with 3MWdc/2MWacMW solar generating system) project sites as a part of the utility’s USD 2 billion grid modernisation program in western North Carolina, as well as Duke Energy’s Crane (4.95 MW/5 MWh) project which will be in Crane, Indiana. Wärtsilä will be providing all three facilities under an EPC contract.

Wärtsilä’s GEMS platform was selected for its real-time control and protection, revenue stacking, and fleet visibility capabilities. GEMS 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.

“This collaboration with Duke Energy is a significant milestone for us,” said Andrew Tang, Vice President, Energy Storage and Optimisation at Wärtsilä Energy. “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.”

The three storage project sites are expected to be commissioned during 2020 and 2021. Additional GEMS software deployments will be taking place across further energy storage sites over the next several years.