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