Portland General Electric Smart Power Center in Salem, Oregon.   Five Megawatts of LiON battery storage attached to the grid and serving a local neighborhood of homes, shopping malls and buildings.   Charges from the grid, and can instantaneously put a burst of power back onto the grid to help ensure reliability by:

• Smoothing spikes in generation caused by locally attached solar arrays the have variable power output.
• Supporting dips in frequency when too much demand is on the transmission line.  It can discharge quickly, using automated frequency sag detection.
• Providing short term feeder-wide backup until PGE’s dispatchable standby generation program kicks on (local diesel generators attached to various sites).
• Potentially providing peak power support at the edge of the grid, offsetting the fact that the transmission lines to the area are becoming congested, but building new transmission is very, very difficult.

This could be a test bed for many future demonstrations of distributed grid control, microgrid islanding technologies, and demonstration of distributed storage use cases.    This project was developed and manged by Software Diligence Services associate Mark Osborn, when he was Smart Grid manager at PGE.