Oak Ridge National Lab, Viridi Taking Battery Storage Collaboration Live to the Grid
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is transitioning years of indoor lab testing with battery energy storage systems (BESS) manufacturer Viridi Parente to a live grid demonstration.
By deploying out into the real world, the two aim to address emerging issues from equipment interactions and battery charging dynamics. They're utilizing 50 kWh to 150 kWh of battery capacity provided from Viridi's 480V lithium-ion systems for grid integration.
A portion of ORNL’s test grid operates as a power distribution field-testing site, allowing lab-tested innovations to scale up into validation pilots.
According to a release, ORNL is developing a system to control clusters of grid resources to meet utility needs. Often known as distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS), these solutions work to orchestrate a framework that aggregates and directs distributed energy resources to balance supply during peak demand, thereby improving energy resiliency.
In 2024, ORNL partnered with Viridi to accelerate grid modernization research. As part of the project, Viridi installed its RPS 150 BESS at the Grid Research Innovation and Development Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. Located at ORNL's Hardin Valley Campus, this site serves as the testing platform for DOE’s resource integration and evaluation project.
The companies state they anticipate presenting their findings, combining Viridi’s battery tech and ORNL's converter system, in the coming months.
Headquartered in Buffalo, New York, Viridi specializes in utility-grid energy storage centered around lithium-ion batteries to advance grid resilience and reliability. Researchers note that DERMS support distribution grid operations and unlock end-customer value, allowing utilities to manage better diverse resources, such as electric vehicle charging or solar storage, both individually and in aggregate.
“This project bridges an important gap by integrating real electrical equipment to understand realistic performance challenges, proving the robustness of ORNL’s new control strategies and AC/DC architecture for supporting the future grid," said Dr. Madhu Sudhan Chinthavali, electrical systems integration program manager at ORNL, in a statement.
For Viridi, the partnership reportedly represents a significant step in its mission to deliver safe, reliable battery energy storage to critical industry infrastructure applications amid rising nationwide electricity demand.
“When a DOE national lab chooses your technology to support their research, it is the highest bar a battery system can meet,” said CEO Jon M. Williams of Viridi. “We built Viridi's fail-safe BESS to perform in exactly these kinds of environments, and we are proud to be partnering with ORNL to advance the grid modernization solutions that utilities across the country need.”
