January 21, 2010
How much electricity are you using? Smart-grid demonstration project to take place on UW campus
| Read about UW research on the next generation of smart grids here. |
The UW is among more than a dozen partners on a $178 million regional test of smart-grid technology. The U.S. Department of Energy announced just before Thanksgiving an $89 million grant to create the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, which will involve 12 utility companies and some 60,000 customers in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. The regional project is being led by Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland, Wash.
Some $3.4 billion in federal money is being invested in smart-grid deployments nationwide through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Pacific Northwest deployment — at test sites including Fox Island, Washington State University’s Pullman campus, and Wyoming’s Teton Mountains, as well as the UW — was the largest of 16 regional deployments the federal government announced last fall.
The campus pilot project is a partnership between the University and Seattle City Light. In the Seattle area, the UW and other customers depend on a limited resource, hydropower, for electricity, said Robert Balzar, director of conservation resources at Seattle City Light. The utility would like to help people use energy more efficiently, Balzar said, and it sees the smart grid pilot with the UW, one of its biggest customers, as a way to do that.
Balzar anticipates the UW will be able to pinpoint energy savings opportunities when it sees exactly where energy is being used on campus — a goal that would appeal to many other large organizations.
“All of the university systems, as well as business and office campuses across the country, will be able to learn from what we’re doing with the smart micro-grid on the University of Washington campus,” he said.
One aspect of the UW pilot will involve installing smart meters on virtually all the buildings on the Seattle campus. Installation at the UW, as at other Pacific Northwest sites, will take place in 2010 and 2011. The test will be live and generating data through 2012 and 2013.
Exactly which residence halls and other buildings will participate in the project will be determined over the next year, taking cost and other considerations into account, said Bradford Spencer, interim director of the special projects group in the UW’s Capital Projects Office.
“We’re on day one of the project,” Spencer said. “We have a lot of decisions to make.”
Right now the campus gets a monthly electrical bill and Facilities Services can only monitor the total amount of electricity being delivered to the campus, says John Chapman, UW Facilities Services’ executive director of campus engineering and operations. The new meters will monitor individual buildings and send updates roughly every 15 minutes to a central monitoring hub. That information can be used to prevent system overloads and improve efficiency, he said.
“The UW Environmental Stewardship Advisory Committee has recommended metering energy use at the building level on campus,” Chapman said. “This project will be a big step in fulfilling that goal. Once we get to the building level, we will be able to compare one building’s performance to another’s and determine if we have any that aren’t performing properly, and it will help us to troubleshoot and identify opportunities for saving. We’re hopeful that we can reduce campus electrical consumption by 5 percent.”
A second aspect of the UW demonstration will be installing experimental sensors in two residence halls and two academic or research buildings. These sensors could potentially monitor and display electrical consumption down to the level of each wall outlet. About 1,000 students in 500 rooms will participate.
UW engineers will evaluate the system’s user interface and investigate cyber-security issues.
“It is becoming increasingly urgent that we develop means for securing the power grid against cyber attacks,” said Tadayoshi Kohno, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and an expert on computer security. “My group will study ways to ensure that this does not compromise users’ security and privacy, and develop cyber-security technologies for future smart-grid power systems.”
The $9.2 million campus smart-grid demonstration project is being conducted by the UW, Seattle City Light and McKinstry Energy Services, a Seattle-based energy efficiency contractor. The U.S. Department of Energy grant will cover half of the project cost. The University will issue a $1.7 million bond that is anticipated to be recouped through energy savings. Seattle City Light, McKinstry and other sub-contractors will share the rest of the project expense.
“This test bed is a competitive advantage for UW students and faculty to do cutting-edge research about smart grids,” said Matt O’Donnell, dean of the UW’s College of Engineering. “And it’s a win for the UW, because the campus will have this energy-saving infrastructure far into the future.”
UW President Mark Emmert added: “This is an exceptional opportunity for our faculty and students to engage smart-grid technology through research and practical application. It’s yet another instance of the University being among the nation’s leaders in our environmental stewardship and sustainability efforts.”
