Project will deliver clean energy technology for emergency response, keeping Vermonters powered up and cutting costs for all GMP customers
Waterbury, VT – A team led by NOMAD Transportable Power Systems (NOMAD) has been selected to receive a $9.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to bring long-duration energy storage to five communities in rural Vermont. In partnership with Green Mountain Power, the mobile energy storage systems will keep communities powered up, drive down costs and carbon, and serve as a new tool for emergency response across the region.
“This project, enabled by the U.S. Department of Energy’s support, will ensure that the benefits of clean energy and long-duration storage reach communities that need them,” said NOMAD CEO Paul Coombs. “We are proud that the systems NOMAD builds here in Vermont will benefit rural communities of the Northeast that are too often left behind.”
Also joining NOMAD for the project are KORE Power, the manufacturer of lithium-ion battery cells and modules and EPRI, the nation’s leading electric reliability research organization, which will study the project’s benefits on reliability and costs, allowing the work to be replicated in future projects across the nation.
GMP purchased the first Vermont-assembled NOMAD Power System and will deploy these new systems to create more Resiliency Zones that strengthen the grid and help prevent outages. In addition to GMP’s microgrid in Panton, there are customized Resiliency Zone projects underway in Brattleboro, Grafton, and Rochester.
“We are so excited to continue rapidly growing battery storage in Vermont to keep everyone powered up through extreme weather,” said Mari McClure, GMP’s president and CEO. “The NOMAD is a flexible mobile tool that keeps communities connected, while also cutting carbon and costs for all.”
When the NOMAD battery is not being used to prevent a specific outage, GMP uses it to help lower costs for all customers. GMP turns to stored energy in the battery during peak power use times, like heatwaves, rather than pulling in more energy from the grid.
For the projects, NOMAD will be building a new, mobile, long-duration energy storage solution using KORE Power’s next-gen modules. Each NOMAD unit will be capable of providing power to about 50 homes for 10 hours. The new units will also incorporate EV charging capabilities so that electric vehicles in outage-stricken communities will have access to power.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s LDES Demonstration Grant Program, supported by the 2020 Energy Act, seeks to advance storage solutions that guarantee a minimum of 10 hours of continuous back-up power during grid outages and a levelized cost of storage of $0.05 or less.
Coombs said the NOMAD project would add an additional benefit that stationary storage solutions cannot match. “Our priority is to provide reliability to these five communities, but because the NOMAD is mobile, it can be dispatched to provide emergency power to communities in need across the region. That flexibility broadens the impact of this grant.”
About Nomad Transportable Power Systems, Inc.
Nomad Transportable Power Systems, Inc. (“NOMAD”), is a Vermont-based company formed by KORE Power in 2020 to provide the energy industry with a standardized mobile energy storage platform. NOMAD is the first entrant into the mobile lithium-ion energy storage space and combines its patent-pending, over-the-road storage units with a standardized docking platform capable of interconnection with any distribution or transmission utility. The NOMAD system was designed from the onset to provide its customers all the benefits of fixed site energy storage, while eliminating both the capital commitments and long-term obligations that traditional energy storage requires.
