This is a 5 year study, which will ultimately develop a local microgrid covering 20 homes and a neighborhood community building, including roughly 80 kW of solar capacity, roughly 50 kW of dispatchable load control, roughly 100 kW of battery storage capacity, zero carbon charging facilities for 10 electric vehicles, and real-time distribution grid support of power quality and reliability up to a local transmission substation level.

The first phase of this project consists of behavioral interviews regarding energy attitudes and practices with neighborhood residents.

The second phase consists of high resolution, real-time monitoring of electric energy use (with more funding, gas energy and water use as well) at a plug load, circuit load, and meter load level. Several existing solar photovoltaic and electric charging installations in the community will be monitored as well. In addition to providing detailed information about household and aggregate neighborhood energy use patterns, this research enables current research at UCSC into identifying individual loads that can be integrated with dynamic load management support of the electric grid under peak conditions, developing pattern recognition algorithms to identify household patterns at a meter level, and the testing of new, high performance sensor and control arrays that allow the microgrid to provide real-time voltage, power factor, and hourly dispatch commitments of energy and load reduction to the regional grid system. It also provides valuable insight into the relationship between perceived and actual energy practices among neighborhood residents, both before and after they have access to detailed information about how they use energy as individual households, and as an aggregate microgrid.

The third phase involves the design, deployment (subject to the outcome of emerging electric energy policy), and monitoring of an advanced neighborhood microgrid.

In addition to providing one of the first closely researched and monitored field deployments of an advanced distributed microgrid in California, along with a detailed understanding of the interaction between individual/community energy norms and embedded infrastructure in the human-built environment, the implications of our microgrid deployment model are potentially important to the economic, social justice, and local control implications of a fundamental shift to a networked, decarbonized electric infrastructure model. One of the critical issues that we face is building a distributed energy network without relying on the current political and economic power relationships which threaten to compromise individual/community privacy and control of how their energy and valuable ancillary system support is produced, consumed, and managed in a distributed system. The current industry conceptual model presumes centralized, hierarchical control, with essentially no individual or community control of locally produced energy resources. Our model presumes that community microgrids offer the same control, privacy, and ability to make commitments to support the local and regional grid system as any of the current cohort of electricity generators, interacting with the regional grid as autonomous network nodes.

This project is tightly integrated with an emerging, cross-disciplinary, project-based, undergraduate/graduate initiative at UCSC, which combines sustainable systems education and skill-building with original, high quality, leading edge, multi-year longitudinal research into critical issues regarding our transition to a just and sustainable human-built world.