A 105-unit affordable apartment building in Buffalo, New York, now holds 3.75 megawatt-hours of lithium-ion batteries inside the building, spread across seven battery rooms. Developer Good Carbon Co. and battery maker Viridi say it’s likely one of the largest indoor battery systems in an occupied U.S. residential building. They announced the installation at Peace Bridge Place on Oct. 20.
The battery is the last piece of a full electrification job. The building already runs geothermal heating and cooling, electric domestic hot water and an upgraded envelope. Residents earn no more than 80% of area median income, according to Good Carbon.
How the indoor battery storage system earns its keep
The system does two jobs. It gives the all-electric building extended backup power during outages, and it cuts the building’s draw from the grid during peaks. National Grid is running the site as a pilot for flexible, grid-responsive load, with Viridi’s energy management software taking signals through EnergyHub’s distributed energy platform. NYSERDA supported the project through its Future Grid Challenge.
Good Carbon CEO Adam Serbert framed it as an operating cost play: lower peak demand charges, demand response payments and a model the company wants to repeat on future multifamily buildings. Nobody has published the installed cost, the size of the NYSERDA award or what the building expects to earn from National Grid. Those are the numbers another owner would need before copying it.
Fire safety is the hurdle for batteries in buildings
Viridi CEO Jon M. Williams didn’t dodge the industry’s record. “A lot of the products on the market over the last 10 years have burned things down,” he told the Associated Press. Viridi says it spent $10 million over six years engineering cell-level containment, half of it on batteries destroyed in testing.
The company says each cell is isolated with plates, pouches and spacing so a failing cell doesn’t set off its neighbors. In the test Viridi cites, a cell was forced into failure while wrapped in cheesecloth, and the cloth didn’t char. Viridi announced in April that the system had passed UL testing that clears it for indoor installation without added fire suppression. Those are the company’s descriptions; the test reports weren’t published with the announcement.
The room count is the detail designers will notice. Split seven ways, the system works out to roughly 536 kilowatt-hours per room. The International Fire Code caps lithium-ion storage at 600 kWh in a single fire area unless the fire code official approves more based on large-scale fire testing. The partners haven’t said whether that limit drove the layout, or what separation and ventilation each room got.
What it means for all-electric multifamily projects
Owners pushing all-electric buildings, like the D.C. office conversions that opened all-electric this month, keep running into the same objection: what happens when the grid goes down. Peace Bridge Place is an answer, but it turns battery rooms into a design and code problem from schematic design onward. Rated rooms, fire department review and a utility agreement all have to be lined up before the electrical sub orders gear.
Viridi says its Buffalo plant can build about 400 MWh of systems a year. If even a sliver of that ends up inside apartment buildings, fire marshals will be writing the playbook as they go.