Holy Cross Energy Partnership

Starting with an idea for a home that also functions as a microgrid, NREL collaborated with Holy Cross Energy.

The goal of this partnership was to build a hierarchical control system to make the household loads grid-interactive, use as much as locally produced clean energy as possible, and help homes coast through power outages during extreme events. This is possible with novel, distributed control architecture developed through the partnership and NREL's foresee™ home energy management system, a 2018 R&D 100 Award winner.

Basalt Vista was built for the community's teachers and county workers as an affordable housing solution in an upscale resort town near Aspen. The Energy Systems Integration Facility at NREL reduced the risk of testing the new technology and gave the utility provider the confidence to deploy use with Holy Cross Energy customers. As the project scales up—from a few homes to a few dozen—the technology for autonomous energy grids, distributed energy resources, and the ability to store energy in your home could be the solution to realizing highly renewable and resilient energy systems. 

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