Hitachi Energy has started building a $10 million engineering, testing and integration center in North Carolina that will help utilities and developers better meet the fast-growing demand for electricity.

Leaders of Hitachi Energy, which has about $16 billion in annual sales and employs more than 50,000 people in 60 countries, say the Power Electronics Center of Competence in Cary, west of Raleigh, will bring together teams working on the design, performance validation and deployment of modular solutions. The aim is to reduce grid congestion and add transmission capacity without building new power lines while also improving networks’ stability.

“We are in the ‘age of electricity,’ where demand is growing faster and the grid has become the new frontline of energy security,” Marco Berardi, a Hitachi Energy senior vice president and head of the company’s grid and power quality group, said in a statement. “This new center will strengthen our ability to respond quickly with localized expertise, helping customers maintain grid stability, resilience and reliability.”

The Cary project, which will also become Hitachi Energy’s global hub for cybercurity work is part of a $1 billion investment push company leaders announced last year. Among that expansion plan’s other projects are:

A $457 million transformer manufacturing plant in South Boston, Virginia, where the company also runs one such facility

A $106 million expansion of a transformer parts facility in Alamo, Tennessee, that will make that plant the largest bushings manufacturing site in North America

Other manufacturers have been working on capacity expansions of their own, many of them focused on transformers. Among those companies are ABB, Eaton, ERMCO, GE Vernova and Schneider Electric. Combined, their investments are comfortably north of $2 billion.