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    G&W Electric couples Vanadium Redox Flow Battery with Solar at hometown Microgrid

    July 19, 2022
    G&W’s microgrid will provide use cases for future market growth. The company’s rooftop solar and battery combination will include the capacity to island, or separate from the grid to deliver peak load shaving for energy savings and backup power
    Image credit G&W
    CellCube CEO ALexander Schoenfeldt, left, poses with G&W Electric CEO John Mueller, center, and Pat Avery, vice president for power grid automation at G&W
    CellCube CEO ALexander Schoenfeldt, left, poses with G&W Electric CEO John Mueller, center, and Pat Avery, vice president for power grid automation at G&W

    Innovation in energy resiliency starts at home for G&W Electric.

    An Austrian energy storage firm is joining with the U.S. grid equipment provider to bolster its microgrid portfolio. American-based G&W Electric is adding CellCube’s vanadium redox flow batterly (VRFB) technology to its microgrid offerings.

    Under the deal, G&W also will become a key reseller for CellCube’s energy storage systems.

    CellCube is part of Austria's Enerox GmbH. The VRFB offers an alternative to lithium as a key element in utility-scale and microgrid-level energy storage.

    “We see the microgrid market is entering a new stage where energy applications that allow for storing electricity from renewables over longer periods of time is gaining more importance,” said John Mueller, chairman and owner of G&W Electric. “For us, it is an obvious step to partner with the market leader of long-duration energy storage.”

    The two companies united on a first project during G&W Electric’s construction of a microgrid in its headquarters base in Bolingbrook, Illinois. The project coupled solar energy with CellCube’s 2 MW/8MWh battery solution.

    G&W’s microgrid will provide use cases for future market growth. The company’s rooftop solar and battery combination will include the capacity to island, or separate from the grid to deliver peak load shaving for energy savings and backup power for mission critical assets.

    The deal with CellCube is the latest of several partnerships G&W has developed lately to strengthen its position in the C&I and mission critical energy transitions. In May,  G&W announced collaboration with grid monitoring technology firm Powerside and a $3.5 million investment in Chicago-based energy storage optimization platform Intelligent Generation.

    G&W is a longtime provider of T&D equipment such as switchgear, reclosers, sensors, automation tools, fault current protection, cable line accessories and switches.

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    (Rod Walton, senior editor for EnergyTech, is a 14-year veteran of covering the energy industry both as a newspaper and trade journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]).

    Follow us on Twitter @EnergyTechNews_ and @rodwaltonelp

    About the Author

    Rod Walton, EnergyTech Managing Editor | Senior Editor

    For EnergyTech editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].

    Rod Walton has spent 15 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. He formerly was energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World. Later, he spent six years covering the electricity power sector for Pennwell and Clarion Events. He joined Endeavor and EnergyTech in November 2021.

    Walton earned his Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. His career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World. 

    EnergyTech is focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

    He was named Managing Editor for Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech starting July 1, 2023

    Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.

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