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High on a mountain in West Virginia sits the largest commercially operated grid-scale battery storage project of its kind. The AES Laurel Mountain facility boasts 98 MW of wind capacity in addition to a 32-MW storage site, with a platform for possible further storage expansion.
"We've never put wind and storage together in one location," Phil Herrington, president of global wind generation for AES Corp., said at an Oct. 27 opening of the facility. "We're just figuring out how we can benefit from it. The grid is enormously complex."
Benefits from the 61 wind turbines include a renewable resource that will help many states within the PJM Interconnection LLC territory reach renewable standards. Benefits from the 1.3 million lithium-ion batteries stored in 16 containers adjacent to the 12-mile wind farm will be seen over time, the company said. The batteries, kept in trays in a series of containers along a ridge of the mountain, will store the energy created...