Who says solar can’t work in Ohio? Two of the state’s universities, The University of Toledo and Case Western Reserve University, are testing new software to automate how buildings use energy on campus, along with the NASA Glenn Research Center.
Case Western Reserve University
The universities have teamed up with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is funding the “Northern Ohio building-to-grid integration demonstration,” along with FirstEnergy, Eaton, Siemens and Johnson Controls.
The project will show how smart building technologies can be incorporated with conventional, solar and wind sources, along with battery storage can efficiently and reliability power buildings. The research would benefit municipalities, utility companies, building owners and others.
CWR will upgrade and monitor two of its older buildings to learn how older buildings can accommodate a more advanced grid. what it will take to get those kinds of buildings on a more futuristic grid. The campus has a wind turbine and is looking into solar and batteries. The University of Toledo already has access to solar power and is looking into batteries.
“By using a ‘living laboratory,’ we can experiment with and demonstrate the real impact these distributed energy resources have and better position us to manage the grid of the future so that we save energy, maintain reliability, reduce costs and preserve customer quality of service,” said Alexis Abramson, director of the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve and the Milton and Tamar Maltz Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in a CWR article.
The University of Toledo
“Whenever possible, users will anticipate peak use and reduce or delay the peak output to off-peak hours,” said Mingguo Hong in the same article. Hong is associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a lead faculty member at Case Western Reserve working on the project. “Transactive control is an essential technology to enable Buildings-to-Grid Integration, a DOE initiative.”
For example, strategies may include setting a ceiling on daily electricity consumption in each building that, in turn, could require small to substantial steps, such as changing the thermostat setting or delaying the use of a lab air compressor. The system will be adjusted to mitigate solar and wind variability and regulate frequency and voltage, power correction and control.
The projects will use VOLTTRON software, an open-source software from the national laboratory that can manage end-use loads, increase building efficiency and integration of distributed variable renewable energy while accessing storage.