FlexGen and Lightshift Energy team up to deliver 80 MW of batteries in Virginia and New England

Two energy companies, FlexGen and Lightshift Energy, are expanding a partnership to build large batteries that store electricity for the grid in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Vermont. Lightshift builds and runs the battery sites, while FlexGen provides the software that manages them. Most of these projects supply power to municipal electric utilities, meaning the local utility that serves a town or city, rather than directly to individual homes.

The companies have already finished six projects, including battery sites in Groton, Massachusetts, and Danville, Virginia, which they recently upgraded to store more power and run more efficiently. They now plan to build ten more sites across New England and the mid-Atlantic, adding over 55 megawatts of power capacity and 200 megawatt-hours of storage. One of these, in Vermont, will be a 16 megawatt battery built for the chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries and is described as the state's largest energy storage project.

For homeowners, this kind of project does not mean a battery shows up at your house. Instead, these large-scale batteries help utilities manage demand on the electric grid, storing power when it is cheap or abundant and releasing it when demand spikes. The companies say this approach can help keep costs down for the communities served by these utilities and make the local grid more reliable, which could mean fewer outages or steadier rates over time, depending on where you live and which utility serves your area.