AMSC has announced that multiple utilities in the United States have ordered pre-production VVO pilot units, under commercial terms, for evaluation purposes.
Introduced to the utility market in 2017, AMSC’s VVO has completed extensive and rigorous third-party standard utility testing, including testing at KEMA Laboratories—the international utility indicator of a product’s reliability and safety in the industry. The VVO systems are expected to cost-effectively address acute and systemic distribution grid challenges ranging from large photovoltaic intermittent power generation to capacity challenges across the distribution grid.
AMSC’s VVO is a new, unprecedented offering with three times the power density of other STATCOMS. AMSC’s VVO is specifically designed to mitigate power quality issues on the distribution power grid for increased distributed generation capacity and to support conservation voltage reduction management. Distributed generation, or DG, is electricity generated within the distribution system itself, as opposed to the stream of electricity generated from centralized power plants. While DG is becoming ubiquitous as a result of the green energy movement, legacy power grids were not built to efficiently respond to certain effects of DG such as bi-directional flow, intermittent output during cloud pass, and the rapid adoption of electric vehicles.
“Our new VVO platform is designed to bring back order and rhythm to the growing disarray within distribution networks,” said Daniel P. McGahn, President and CEO, AMSC. “VVO leverages AMSC’s 15 years of experience in Volt/VAR innovation on the transmission network, and is now formatted to help stabilize modern distribution networks. With these VVO™ orders, we have fulfilled our commercial orders objective for this fiscal year.”
D-VAR VVO not only manages current power quality concerns, but also expands grid capacity for DG, reacting seamlessly to cloud pass or changing wind speeds across the distribution grid.
AMSC’s VVO pilot partners are established utilities with distribution networks experiencing rapid growth of DG and electric vehicle (EV) charging capacity within their distribution networks. VVO™ optimizes power electric grids at the distribution level, by providing the essential flexibility and responsiveness needed as electric grids evolve towards a DG architecture, while maintaining efficiency and superior power quality for consumers.
