How Orlando Utilities Commission has been testing grid tech innovation

What do the Nissan Leaf, floating solar, flywheels and flow batteries have in common? Each is being tested by Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) at their Gardenia Innovation Centre, with the potential outcome of being deployed for power grid management.

When it comes to ‘innovation’, many companies and even utilities like to float their boat by espousing plans for new technologies and “being at the forefront” of the energy transition.

Yet, talking the talk and walking the walk are vast kilometres apart. For the OUC, however, their stride is clear.

This became apparent during a visit to the municipality-owned public utility’s innovation centre in Orlando, Florida.

A stroll through a solar array EV-charging parking lot, past a living wall and rain harvest garden led me to a site easy on the eyes: a floating solar array arranged along a large pond adjacent to the Gardenia facility.

Nestled on the bank is the array’s SMA smart inverter, sitting next to a Nissan Leaf hooked up to a bi-directional EV charging station of 50kW, charging and discharging stored energy within a vehicle to grid (V2G) setup, adjacent to a 120kW DC fast charger and level 2 EV chargers.

A 10kW/40kWh vanadium redox flow battery and two 8kW/32kWh flywheels lie next to the setup; the latter’s full structure was only represented by a portion 2.5ft above ground, the body of the beast residing 8ft underground.

A living lab

Ushering in the energy transition has many implications, a major one being modernisation. But where do we start on the modernisation journey? With testing.

This is what the Gardenia Centre does, testing pre-commercialised or newly commercialised technology. Once done with testing, components are replaced by other installations for testing and/or are deployed along OUC’s grid.

The tech on display during my visit to the Centre each formed a component of the utility’s grid integration lab, setting up a microgrid system to react to demand events while coordinating solar smoothing.

Leading our tour was OUC’s Rubin York, a project research engineer.

Explained York: “The part you cannot see is all the research we’ve been doing with UCF (the University of Central Florida), our local university here in Orlando. We’ve worked with them for about three years now, developing custom in-house control algorithms for orchestrating solar, storage and controllable loads, like EV charging, all together.”

York describes the nature of the integration lab and explains the flow of the tech coming in and going out after extensive operations.

“It is a living lab and part of the idea is that some of these technologies will go in and then get taken out. The flow batteries are a good example. They’ve been in for about four years and they’re coming out … in about three or four months.

“[We’ll] replace them with different batteries as we’ve learned everything we want to learn about them. It’s just time to move on – it’s a living lab. We are constantly taking things out and putting things in.”

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Grid innovation: Conquering the clouds

Referencing the smart setup of the EV, flywheels and smart inverter, York explains one key job of the integration lab: “PV smoothing. It’s looking in real-time at what the solar is doing and what storage capacity is available.”

York explained that efficient dispatch can be auto piloted by gathering weather data, such as cloud coverage.

With such data, he explained “we know where the shadow is on the ground and we know when and how much we’ll gain and lose solar.

This is a key area of importance for the Floridian utility due to the amount of cloud cover Orlando experiences.

According to Fox reportage, calling Florida the ‘Unshine’ State, the province earlier this year entered its cloudiest winter period in 84 years.

The state spends a lot of time under cloud cover, says the OUC in a blog post, a weather pattern caused by warm waters hugging its coastlines, sea breezes coming from the east and west, high humidity and long rainy seasons. Orlando specifically can see 277 days of partly cloudy or cloudy weather a year.

This is why such tech being developed by the OUC could prove critical. As the clouds set in, the sun and its solar energy disappear. Thus, a method like PV smoothing mitigates this, allowing for optimal consumption.

“With that information, we can then dispatch the energy storage to take solar from fluctuating crazily to smooth out curves, hence PV/solar smoothing.

“Beyond that it will also automatically detect when we are in a demand event. The system is connected to the building’s demand meters and will detect when we’re in a demand event and switch to demand mitigation mode, where it does peak shaving operations.

York elaborated that the current development being tested involves the ability of the lab to automatically do microgrid controls, recognising when the grid falls out and going into a microgrid mode.

“We also have a user interface that we’ve developed with it that will eventually give operators in the dispatch centre the ability to go in and turn certain features on or off, automate or make certain features manual.”

As the power system evolves and becomes more complex with more renewable energy sources coming online, testing these technologies will be crucial, especially to ensure that we have a power grid fit for purpose.

And as tech innovation only continues to climb in scope and ambition, Gardenia’s portfolio will certainly be one to keep an eye on.