NEC Energy Solutions (NEC ES) recently announced six additional energy storage projects of more than 20 MW at municipal power plants throughout New England including Madison, Maine, and Ashburnham, Templeton, Wakefield, Middleton and Taunton, Massachusetts. The new projects follow the model of the Sterling Municipal Light Department installed two years ago that has saved ratepayers more than $1 million on their utility bills. These energy storage systems reduce costs for transmission and capacity charges.
NEC’s most recently contracted project with the Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant (3 MW/6 MWh) will be one of the largest in New England to date. TMLP plans to operate the GSS Grid Storage Solution from their Cleary-Flood Generating Station, where system conditions are monitored 24/7. Through reducing transmission and capacity costs during peak demand times, the project will provide savings to TMLP ratepayers for years to come.
The energy storage systems include NEC’s GSS end-to-end grid storage solution and its AEROS controls system, which is NEC’s proprietary energy storage control software platform. The storage systems are dispatched to reduce the municipal power plants heaviest electric loads each month. These peak periods determine their yearly capacity costs and monthly transmission costs.
Three of Massachusetts municipal power plants including Ashburnham, Templeton and Wakefield are partnering with Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (“MMWEC”). The Wakefield, Ashburnham and Templeton projects use MMWEC’s peak load forecasting system and remote dispatch program. MMWEC staff predicts the best time to dispatch the batteries based on its forecasts of increased electricity demand, and the batteries are then remotely dispatched from MMWEC’s 24/7 operations center in Ludlow, Mass.
Several of the projects were made possible through grants from the Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) program, including Wakefield, Ashburnham and Taunton. The ACES program, a partnership between the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) and the state Department of Energy Resources (DOER), is a competitive grant initiative to pilot innovative, broadly-replicable energy storage projects that advance energy storage technologies in Massachusetts.
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