Efficient and responsive power

With so much of our lives dependent on electronics and the internet, smart back-up power is essential to a community’s resilience, health, safety, and well-being.

Distributed energy resources (DER), such as VoltaGrid’s mobile microgrid, remove your reliance on the utility grid. Our energy-storage system enables your community to make use of its renewable assets, while our fast-responding natural-gas generators provide clean and economical power when the grid fails.

Some states even provide incentives for smart, clean, distributed energy resources, such as VoltaGrid. Search DSIRE USA to find incentives near you.

With the need to keep guests comfortably entertained around-the-clock year-round, hotels, casinos and other resort properties are excellent candidates for combined heat & power microgrids [U.S. EPA 2005, 2007].

Because the hospitality industry requires significant electrical and thermal loads, even at night, VoltaGrid’s grid-paralleling microgrid ensures power reliability while providing the opportunity to reduce peak demand charges and integrate on-site renewable energy resources that many properties have installed in recent years. Moreover, waste heat captured off VoltaGrid’s gensets can be used to meet hospitality properties’ significant air conditioning requirements.

Uptime and power quality are critical to data center operations. Even minor, sub-cycle transients can drop connections that occur at sub-millisecond speeds.

Because of this sensitivity to power drops, many data centers keep their on-site generators in standby mode, constantly consuming fuel to keep the generators warm [U.S. DOE 2011]. With VoltaGrid’s always-available energy-storage system, we can detect and correct power quality issues without the need to keep our quick-responding natural-gas generators warm. And, we’ll only charge you for the kWh you consume — greatly reducing your capital investment on standby generation.

In the electric hydraulic fracturing industry, intermittent duty cycles reign: during a pressure pumping stage, loads frequently exceed 16 MWe (i.e., 18,750 hhp, or 85 bpm at 9,000 psi) for an hour or more; then, the load drops to less than 0.75 MWe for the 15- to 45-minute transition.

Greenhouses, grow houses, and hydroponic agricultural facilities rely on continuous water pumping, and in many cases, around-the-clock lighting and highly sophisticated HVAC systems to accelerate agricultural production. Without electrical power, crops — and profits — wither within hours.

VoltaGrid’s grid-paralleling microgrid can provide back-up power and demand-shaving opportunities for agricultural facilities currently connected to the grid. And for those facilities too remote to connect to the grid, our reciprocating natural gas generators can be connected in a combined heat & power setup, where waste heat helps to drive HVAC load and CO₂ emissions help to feed the crops — all at an affordable $/MWh rate.

Although many hospitals and medical centers have some level of emergency backup power onsite, recent power outages exposed just how meager those resources are.

Generally designed to ride-through an outage of less than an hour and supply power only to the most critical services, hospitals and medical centers are vulnerable to extended statewide outages, such as eight states in the Northeast in 2003 and across Texas in 2021 [U.S.DHHS]. During these extended outages, facilities lost water pressure, water heating, HVAC, and food refrigeration; staff were unable to access digital patient records, view X-rays, or transport patients between floors [U.S.DHHS].

Where the loss of power literally means life or death, power reliability is first and foremost. VoltaGrid’s black-start-capable, island-able microgrid provides reliable power, whenever you need it. With the ability to detect an outage and automatically switch over to our fast-responding natural gas generators, you’ll have full facility functionality even when the grid goes down.

Some states even provide incentives for smart, clean, distributed energy resources, such as VoltaGrid. Search DSIRE USA to find incentives near you.

Certain industrial facilities, such as manufacturers using CNC machines, are highly susceptible to power quality issues: even a flicker — a transient barely detectable to the human eye — can cost thousands of dollars of lost work-in-progress, and potentially crash multi-million-dollar machines. Chemical and pharmaceutical companies may need to trash a batch in process.

While other industrial facilities may not be as vulnerable, their mere location at the end of the distribution line means they may face more frequent and more serious power quality issues, such as under-voltage sags and frequency deviations.

Whether operating in grid-parallel mode to correct power quality issues and aid in peak-shaving, or as standby power, VoltaGrid’s energy storage system and fast-responding natural gas generators enable industrial facilities to reduce energy costs while saving valuable work-in-progress — all for an affordable $/MWh rate.

With energy costs constituting 30% or more of total operations costs, the mining industry increasingly relies on electrification to cut energy consumption by 15-50% [Deloitte 2016]. The resulting load profile has a moderate baseload for lighting, ventilation and conveyance with occasional peaks requiring aggressive load-step changes when a rock crusher or hoist starts [U.S. DOE 2007].

In the oil & gas industry, intermittent duty cycles reign: during a pressure pumping stage, loads frequently exceed 16 MWe (i.e., 18,750 hhp, or 85 bpm at 9,000 psi) for an hour or more; then, the load drops to less than 0.75 MWe for the 15- to 45-minute transition.

While new communication standards, such as 5G, are more efficient on a GB/kWh basis, the growing bandwidth requirements and data usage more than offset any potential savings [McKinsey 2020]. Together, increasing energy consumption and rising electric rates are squeezing margins for many operators.

Today, many telecom facilities are grid-connected, where available, with on-site diesel generation. However, recent inclement weather events demonstrated the shortfall of this approach [e.g., CNET 2021], with grid outages lasting longer than onsite fuel reserves — or relying on technology that’s not black-start capable.

VoltaGrid’s modular microgrid can power telecom facilities serving remote areas without breaking the bank. Our black-start capable generators can operate as individual units or in multiple-unit configurations, and you simply pay an affordable $/MWh rate for their use.