How MicroGrid Networks supports NYC’s electrical grid

When walking down Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, past MicroGrid Networks’ site, passersby can hear the constant buzzing of the company’s energy storage system holding power taken from the city’s electrical grid during off-peak hours. And when the batteries are discharging power, it’s even louder, according to the company’s acquisitions manager, Robert Woods.

“It is a memorable sound,” Woods told Tech Brew during a February tour of the 7,500-square-foot facility. “We consider it a beautiful sound because that’s when we’re actually trading energy.”

By “trading energy,” Woods is referring to when MicroGrid Networks’ system puts the energy that it has stored back into the electrical grid, which happens when the grid doesn’t have enough power to meet demand. The company’s plants (the second location is in Maspeth, Queens) are both connected to Con Edison, an electric provider that services NYC. When demand for electricity is low, usually at night, MicroGrid Networks’ batteries pull power off the electrical grid and store it. And when demand is high—like in the summer when many New Yorkers are using power to cool down their homes—the batteries feed power back into the grid.

Piece by piece: The MicroGrid Networks system functions through a handful of components. When the site is pulling energy from the grid, power comes through the Con Edison feeder, or a power line underground. Straight from the grid, the energy is 27 kilovolts but in order to be stored in the batteries the company uses, it needs to be 480 volts. So, the power goes through inverters and transformers to “downgrade the energy levels” and then into the batteries themselves.

“[The batteries are the size of] little PlayStations, but like five to seven on each row,” Wood said. At the Williamsburg site, there are four rows of batteries each capable of storing 2.5 megawatt hours.

All the batteries that MicroGrid Networks uses are lithium-ion, which can be at risk of catching fire if stored improperly or damaged. Wood told Tech Brew that the site hasn’t had any flammability issues, but if there are instances of thermal runaway—or the electrical current in the battery getting too hot—the battery infrastructure is equipped with deflagration panels.

“If there is any thermal runaway or steam that comes from the batteries, [the] panels open up so that pressure is relieved,” Wood said.

The why (and how): But how does this complex technical process support NYC’s electric grid? Well, MicroGrid Networks’ batteries reduce the need for peak power demand plants, also called peakers, which are used when the grid cannot supply enough power to meet demand. And they’re rarely used: They only run 2%–7% of the total hours per year.

“The power that’s produced [in peaker plants] is very expensive because you have to build the power plant, maintain it, staff it, and then you never run it,” MicroGrid Networks’ COO Tim Dumbleton told Tech Brew. “What our battery power plants do is essentially replace some of those peaker plants.”

There are 65 peaker plants in New York State, all primarily fueled by gas or oil—nonrenewable energy. Thus, facilities like MicroGrid Networks can also help New York State reduce its usage of fossil fuels, too. Dumbleton says they’re vital to hitting the state’s decarbonization goals.

“There’s no path to decarbonizing New York City's electrical grid without building a whole ton of these batteries spread throughout the neighborhoods,” Dumbleton said.

And MicroGrid Networks is planning on expanding into other neighborhoods beyond Williamsburg and Queens. Dumbleton told Tech Brew that the company is working on a new site near Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that will feed electricity to a substation that powers Crown Heights as well as Richmond Hill, Queens.

“We collectively have paid for all of that electrical infrastructure [as taxpayers],” Dumbleton said. “Let’s use it to its best efficiency.”