Xcel Energy Selects GridPoint Software Platform for Wind-To-Battery Project
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Project Extends Xcel Energy and GridPoint Business Relationship
ARLINGTON, VA – Nov. 18, 2008 – GridPoint, Inc., a leading clean tech company whose smart grid software platform benefits electric utilities, consumers and the environment, announced today that Xcel Energy selected GridPoint’s software platform to control the flow of power between the grid and a NGK Insulators’ sodium-sulfur battery storing wind energy. When fully charged, the one-megawatt battery will hold approximately 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity, potentially powering 500 homes for over seven hours. This is the first U.S. application of the battery as a direct wind energy storage device.
The GridPoint Platform applies information technology to the electric grid to provide utilities with an intelligent network of distributed energy resources that controls load, stores energy and produces power. It will allow Xcel Energy to explore using real-time grid conditions and energy pricing to determine when the battery charges or discharges. Based on system regulation and pricing signals received by the software platform, the battery’s charging behavior will be adaptively controlled. When the demand for electricity is high, as an example, stored wind energy could be automatically discharged to the grid, supplementing the power flow. When demand is low, the software platform could issue commands for the battery to store the available energy. (more…)