Long-time Slashdot reader joemite shared Wired’s report about a small town of Basalt Vista, Colorado, where homeowners like Katela Escobar are testing highly scaleable “advanced power grid technologies that could turn every home into an appendage of a decentralized power plant.”
Basalt Vista is designed to be an all-electric community that produces as much power as it uses. Each home comes outfitted with an electric vehicle charger in the garage, a large battery pack in the basement, and a roof covered with solar panels. The homes are linked together as a microgrid, a self-contained electricity distribution network that can operate independently of the regional electric grid. Their energy systems work together to balance the energy load across the neighborhood — the solar panels harvest energy, plugged in EVs can store electricity as needed, and large battery packs can supply power when the sun isn’t shining.
But what makes Basalt Vista’s microgrid unique is that it autonomously allocates power. There’s an internet-connected control box in the basement of each home running experimental software that continuously optimizes electricity distribution across the microgrid and the flow of energy to and from the larger regional grid. When one home produces more energy than it needs, it can autonomously make the decision to redistribute it to its neighbors or store it for later…
Basalt Vista is a testbed for a so-called “virtual power plant,” a network of self-optimizing energy resources that unbundles the centralized utility and distributes it across the grid… [T]hey aggregate and control distributed energy sources so they can perform the functions of a large centralized power plant — generating and storing electricity — for the wider grid. This virtual power plant could serve as an antidote to the inherent variability of renewable energy systems by efficiently matching supply and demand across widely-distributed electricity producers and consumers.
For now, the technology exists in the basements of Escobar and her neighbors at Basalt Vista. But if the experiment is successful, it may one day control power for millions of other families.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot