GridBeyond, a Dublin-based company specializing in renewable energy services, secured $7.8 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The money is intended to fund a research and development project for advanced reliability and resiliency operations for wind and solar.
The project, named ARROWS for short, aims to demonstrate the scalability, cost-effectiveness and reliability of leveraging GridBeyond’s AI-powered control technology to deliver advanced grid services autonomously. ARROWS will integrate inverter-based resources like solar photovoltaic devices and battery storage into the state of New Mexico’s electricity grid.
GridBeyond is working to help the Public Service Company of New Mexico, or PNM, achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2040. The company will implement its renewables control platform to enable real-time forecasting, optimization and control of the inverter-based resources under PNM’s management. Over two demonstration periods spanning at least six months each, the project will allow GridBeyond to analyze and quantify PNM’s overall cost of service.
“This project has the potential to boost confidence in renewable power investment while simultaneously helping to make New Mexico’s utility grid both greener and more resilient,” Ben Sigrin, a senior project manager at Gridbeyond, said in a statement. “In addition to generating both economic and environmental benefits across the state, this project will serve as a template for other utilities to follow as they actively work to achieve their own green sustainability targets.”
