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Home > Featured Stories > Innovation and Discovery > November 2008 > Creating a Smart "Internet for Energy"Creating a Smart "Internet for Energy"
This will convert the traditional power system into a grid that is largely automated, applying greater intelligence to operate, monitor and, yes, heal itself when that's needed.
NC State chancellor James L. Oblinger
Dr. Alex Huang is currently the Progress Energy Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at NC State.
By David Hunt, News Services
The effort to create a "smart" electrical grid – deemed so vital to the economic and security future of the nation that it's been called "our generation's moon shot" – is centered on Centennial Campus at NC State, where Dr. Alex Huang leads an international team of researchers working to turn a clever concept into reality.
Huang, Progress Energy Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering, freed himself from his lab last Tuesday just long enough to attend an event celebrating an important milestone for the project – the awarding of a five-year, $18.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant enables NC State to establish a home for Huang's research: the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems.
The grant also caught the attention of Erskine Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system, who attended the Oct. 28 event to underscore the importance of the research.
"We are here to celebrate what I believe is the single most important economic and national-security project of our time – bringing renewable electrical-energy technologies into homes and businesses throughout America," he said.
NC State was the lead agency on another ERC proposal that reach final consideration: the Innovative Fibrous Systems ERC, which focuses on the development of fiber-based solutions for a range of critical human needs, from medicine to homeland security. Also, NC State's Constructed Facilities Laboratory was a partner institution on a third ERC finalist proposal with the University of Miami.
But it's not just engineers and scientists who see promise in such research. The new FREEDM center has raised $10 million in institutional support and membership fees from more than 65 utility companies, electrical equipment manufacturers, alternative energy start-ups and other established and emerging firms. Eventually, Huang said, the effort could translate into a 10-year, $100 million program.
The payoff would make it worth every dime, resulting in an energy revolution that would reach every home and business in the United States. It would be, Huang said, "an Internet for energy."
The goal of the research is to develop a grid that relies more on smaller, regional electricity generators than on large, multi-state utilities. Huang compares it to using a local-area network instead of a mainframe computer. The smart grid would create a "plug-and-play system" so people could power their homes and charge up their cars on any source of energy, from their own solar panels to a nearby wind farm.
That would open renewable energy to wider and more efficient use, he said, and would relieve the demand on the 100-year-old "legacy grid" – especially at peak times.
"We know how to produce renewable energy, but we don't have a way to consistently store and use the energy," Huang said. "We generate it, and we use it.
"We need more intelligent energy management that can store and balance supply and demand."
Just as the Internet provided an information highway that linked computers nationwide, the FREEDM System will build the highway for renewable energy resources, allowing customers to invest in green technologies and sell excess energy back to the grid. In its first five years, the center will develop a one-megawatt demonstration grid to power its own headquarters on Centennial Campus. The demonstration will rely on new fundamental research in post-silicon electronics, system theory, computer engineering, and storage technologies.
Huang and his colleagues at NC State are working with engineers and scientists at Arizona State, Florida State, Florida A&M, Missouri University of Science & Technology, in addition to German and Swiss partners to design and construct the new smart grid. The team is already working on needed breakthroughs in energy storage, system control and solid-state devices to make the enabling technologies for the grid possible.
NC State officials are excited about the opportunity to take a leadership role in such groundbreaking energy research. Chancellor James Oblinger, who named 2008 the "year of energy" at NC State, said the technology would open the door to the large-scale use of alternative energy.
"The center will develop technology that will literally transform the nation's century-old, centralized power grid to one that can easily store and distribute energy produced from solar panels, wind farms, fuel cells and a multitude of other energy sources," he said. "This will convert the traditional power system into a grid that is largely automated, applying greater intelligence to operate, monitor and, yes, heal itself when that's needed."
Dr. Louis Martin-Vega, dean of the College of Engineering, said the FREEDM Center was a good fit for NC State's highly collaborative faculty and students.
"In this global knowledge-based economy, the workforce must be innovative, entrepreneurial and technologically proficient, which is really just the kind of graduate that the College of Engineering produces," he said.
