Smart meters, which measure electricity use in near real-time, have been installed in more than 40% of homes in the United States, yet the promises of smaller electric bills, reduced electric generation capacity, greenhouse gas reductions, and a more energy-engaged society, have yet to materialize. This Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) project seeks to enable a next generation residential energy market that will reduce consumers' costs, increase the flexibility of the electric grid to integrate renewable energy of all types and sizes -- roof top solar to large scale wind farms -- while increasing the robustness of electricity delivery. This project will test whether adding rechargeable batteries (electric storage) to individual smart meters will turn these potential benefits into reality. This research leverages a new Energy Smart Community (ESC), comprised of 12,000 smart meters and a wireless data network in the Ithaca NY area deployed in response to New York State?s Reforming the Energy Vision strategy. The network of 12 thousand homes equipped with smart meters will become the test bed for this project. Researchers, working with the primary partners, will actively engage residential customers in the design of the smart service system and involve consumers in the testing and optimization of the virtual storage systems. A smart service system will control when the battery charges (purchases electricity from the grid) and when it discharges (avoiding purchasing electricity from the grid) allowing the thus far unrealized savings for consumers, while creating potential new business opportunities and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The resulting smart service system will be highly marketable and readily transferable to other communities and utilities throughout the United States and the world. This project is an integrated collaboration that is uncommon for universities. It engages a regulated utility, for-profit corporations, venture investors, residential community members and government agencies with a shared intent to bring solutions to the market at scale. This team will develop the smart service system infrastructure that will allow the retail energy market considered crucial to 21st century power distribution, to emerge.
A signature of this project is the use of computer models to simulate residential batteries, which may be either stand-alone or contained within an electric vehicle, allowing researchers to test situations where most residential homes have a battery without the cost or challenges of purchasing and installing them. A small number of homes will be outfitted with real batteries to ensure the computer models accurately capture how real batteries function. Five cross-disciplinary and cross-organizational tasks will leverage the team's skill sets: (1) Develop and test a unique experimental economics platform that will guide the design of market mechanisms that focus on customer-based distributed storage and generation capacity in electricity distribution systems, (2) Design, implement, and test a fully instrumented, control and communication capable, prototype smart service system at the individual residence level, (3) Develop virtual storage simulation modeling tools to integrate into the ESC advanced metering infrastructure (smart meters) to enable the efficient testing of different time-varying rate scenarios at low cost, (4) Design, implement, and analyze cross-disciplinary survey and focus group efforts to understand, engage, and collect feedback from the consumer, and (5) Carry out customer choice and consumer incentivization research.
The lead institution is Cornell University with its units the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Communications, Natural Resources, Applied Economics and Management, and Information Science (academic non-profit). Primary Partners are: AVANGRID, Inc. (New Haven CT, large business), BMW North America (Woodcliff Lake NJ, large business), SolarCity (San Mateo CA, large business) and Cornell Cooperative Extension -Tompkins County (Ithaca NY, non-profit). Distributed Sun (Washington DC, small business) is a broader-context partner.
