Smarter Grid Solutions Demonstrates Smart Campus Power Control at NREL (Text Version)

This is the text version for the Smarter Grid Solutions Demonstrates Smart Campus Power Control at NREL video.

Bob Currie, Smarter Grid Solutions chief technology officer: The way that the distribution system has been planned and operated for a number of years is this is very rightly focused on reliability. As more and more renewable energy sources and distributed energy technologies come on the system, we need to find new ways of planning and operating to accommodate them, so we are working with NREL to demonstrate our technology platform—Active Network Management—here at the ESIF facility.

Jeremiah Miller, Smarter Grid Solutions senior power system analyst: Active Network Management arose in the UK as the technology term for grid edge real-time control systems. These active network management or ANM systems allow the grid to connect more wind and solar, more energy devices, beyond which the utility would have ever allowed before.

Art Anderson, NREL lab program manager for Grid Integration: New technology is risky for utilities because their goal is safety and reliability, so introducing new technologies is very difficult because they don't want to introduce risk.

The ESIF environment at NREL provides an environment where vendors can come bring their solutions and validate the functionality and where there are failures, work out the failures, or where there are enhancements and developments, implement those in an integrated environment with no risk.

Bob Curry: Coming to ESIF, what it's meant for us is that we can test a broader range of use cases. There's nothing better than the real devices—real physical devices—sophisticated technologies, we get the opportunity to to build our platform here in this environment. There are the physical devices here that are representative of the wind, solar, electric vehicle storage that we typically interact with on real distribution grids so we get the chance to integrate with them. We also get the chance to couple that with the real-time simulation capability here, so we can embed those devices as power hardware-in-the-loop and run a whole series of tests. Bringing it all together and trying to make it work in concert is, you know, it's a real exciting challenge and doing it on real devices, real systems—those opportunities don't come along very often, particularly from a small-business perspective, it gives us the chance because we can move quickly and we develop quickly. It gives us the chance to really develop industry, move things into the market. And that's extremely exciting.