California grid tech sandbox launched to help integrate DERs

DERConnect has been launched as a testbed for the power grid on the University of California San Diego campus.

The DERConnect testbed, funded with a $42 million grant from the National Science Foundation, is aimed to help utility, industry and academic researchers to better understand how to integrate more distributed energy resources such as solar panels, wind turbines, smart buildings and electric vehicle batteries into the power grid

The DERConnect headquarters includes batteries that can store power produced by solar panels to be used later on the grid.

One room is dedicated to servers and computers capable of simulating power grids for entire cities and states.

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Another is dedicated to small Raspberry Pi computers that control individual devices on the UC San Diego campus’ microgrid, such as electric vehicle charging stations, printers, TVs, smart plugs and more.

A further room houses devices that act like giant breaker boxes to turn all these assets on and off.

“We are replicating the entire California power grid in one campus,” said Jan Kleissl, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the project’s principal investigator.

Quoted in a news feature from The university, he said: “The reality is that no one knows exactly what the grids of the future will look like. We designed DERConnect as a flexible research platform to allow researchers to dig into some of the hardest hardware, software and controls questions related to distributed grids of the future.”

Some of the assets that DERConnect will be able to control include a dozen buildings on the university campus, all of the campus’ solar panels and chargers for EVs and more than 2,400 light fixtures and 800 smart plugs.

A preliminary study that used this ability to control these devices showed that turning off the devices that control air flow for rooms in a building outside of business hours could halve the energy costs.

The researchers estimate that similar savings could be achieved by turning off printers and TVs when not in use.

The facility is set to be available for use by both on-site and remote researchers.

While the number and diversity of distributed energy resources on the power grid is rapidly expanding, the adoption of these for balancing is hindered by concerns about safety, reliability and cost.

The DERConnect facility should enable researchers to explore these and other important questions in a real-world environment in order to create the resilient, decarbonised grids of the future.