The project is part of the larger $178-million Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, led by Battelle Memorial Institute, Northwest Division. Spanning five states and affecting more than 60,000 consumers, the overall project is to demonstrate and validate new smart grid technologies and inform business cases; provide two-way communication between distributed generation, storage, and demand assets and the existing grid infrastructure; quantify smart grid costs and benefits; and advance interoperability standards and cyber security approaches

Each of the five EnerDel battery systems will store enough energy to power roughly 400 average American homes simultaneously for up to an hour at a time utilizing the same core chemistry as the EnerDel batteries designed for the emerging new generation of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The new systems will be used in concert with a variety of both hardware and software solutions to improve system reliability during peak demand loads.

The PGE project will be built in Salem, OR, where it will serve both residential and commercial customers. Equipment will be installed at 15 sites over the next two years, after which developers will spend two to three years testing system performance under wide variety of geographic and meteorological conditions.