Siemens Energy announced that it will design, build and commission a black-start system at Clearway’s Marsh Landing Generating Station near Antioch, California (“Marsh Landing”). Black-start capabilities will allow the station to restart the flow of electricity to the facility’s auxiliary systems without the support of an external power supply in the case of an outage or blackout situation. Siemens Energy will engineer and build a customized battery energy storage system (“BESS”) that can support up to three attempts to restart a unit at Marsh Landing within one hour. Traditional emergency back-up systems run on diesel generators or small, fossil fuel industrial turbines. By contrast, the BESS-based black-start system operates in a carbon-neutral way to start one of the plant’s four combustion turbine generator units. In addition to the BESS, the project will involve transformers to increase voltage, switch gear to integrate the BESS into the broader Marsh Landing system, electrical, civil and structural engineering and control system modifications. The Marsh Landing Generating Station is a four-unit simple-cycle plant and was one of Siemens Energy’s first “Flex-Power” plants, which are capable of fast starts that minimize emissions while ramping up to full power in only 12 minutes. It entered commercial operation in 2013 and can provide 720 megawatts of electricity to the California grid, enough to serve up to 650,000 homes. Siemens Energy supplied the four gas turbines, four generators, the SPPA-T3000 distributed control system and auxiliary and secondary systems for the plant.