Principal Investigator: Prabir Barooah

Co-PI: Sean Meyn

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

Start Date: October 1, 2016

End Date: September 30, 2020

Amount: $758,001

Abstract

The ultimate goal of the project is to help the electric grid become more reliable even when a large amount of electricity is generated from green, but intermittent – sources such as solar and wind. To deal with this intermittency, inexpensive source of energy storage are required. Instead of investing in batteries, this project seeks to obtain cheap storage by manipulating power demand in consumer loads through intelligent decision-making algorithms. By varying power demand up and down from what a load would nominally consume, the load can be made to behave like a battery, effectively creating a source of Virtual Energy Storage (VES). This kind of virtual storage is cheaper than batteries since it is a software-based solution; little additional hardware is needed. Another aspect of the project is to develop decision-making algorithms to cope with operational issues faced by the power distribution networks (that deliver electricity to neighborhoods) due to increasing use of intermittent solar power.