AFWERX, the innovation arm of the US Air Force, has awarded Geminus an SBIR Phase I contract for physics-informed AI in microgrid and battery optimization. Under it, the company will build an intelligent twin of a forward-deployed microgrid, which is intended to extend battery life, to reduce fuel use and to keep power reliable at mission-critical sites.
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Geminus, a US-based company that builds AI-driven intelligent twins of industrial systems, said on 27 October 2026, from its base in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that it has been selected by AFWERX for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract on physics-informed AI for microgrid and battery optimization in the Department of the Air Force (DAF). The award also takes Geminus into battery storage and grid management, as its platform has so far served large-scale energy infrastructure.
The system that Geminus will model is a forward-deployed microgrid, in which diesel generators and lithium-ion batteries serve mission loads that shift over time. Its twin is meant to give the batteries a longer life, to burn less fuel and to keep power reliable where it is mission critical, and the company has described Phase I as the opening to a follow-on pilot.
That twin will rest on a change in the way such models are made. According to Geminus, digital twins had been bespoke projects that were built by hand and calibrated once, and they went out of date as soon as the real system changed. Its platform is said to make them repeatable and rapid, grounded in physics and aware of their own uncertainty, so that they can optimize live operations even on equipment that ages. Many of the world's largest energy companies are using it, and the company has reported double-digit performance gains.
Every digital twin used to be a bespoke project, so most industrial systems never got one. We made intelligent twins repeatable, reliable, and fast enough to act on in real time. Storage is where the grid's biggest problem gets solved or gets stuck.
Greg Fallon, Chief Executive Officer of Geminus
The contract has come through the SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) process, which the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and AFWERX have streamlined with faster proposal-to-award times, a wider pool of small businesses and less overhead in contract execution. AFWERX, which is headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, awarded more than 1,000 contracts worth $1.37 billion in fiscal year 2025, and it achieved 438 Phase III transitions valued at $8.1 billion.
As BESS News has reported, US defense and resilience buyers have been turning to storage through 2026. In July, Eos Energy Enterprises received a Golden Dome for America contract from the Department of War for a Z3 zinc-based long-duration storage prototype at a critical installation. In September, NOMAD Transportable Power Solutions was authorized by the US Department of Energy to take its Vermont project, valued at approximately $19 million, into Phase 3 with up to eight transportable BESS units, and PG&E named six community microgrids that will share $30 million.