EETD Microgrids Researchers to Collaborate with MIT and IIT-Comillas University

July 11, 2014

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announces the signature of a collaboration license with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IIT-Comillas University (Madrid) for its Utility of the Future Program. DER-CAM, software developed in the Microgrids Group at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), will play a key-role in this project, which is part of the MIT Energy Initiative.

Greater utilization of local energy resources, increasing use of natural gas (NG), and integration of renewables (solar photovoltaic and wind) into electricity supply are prominent in contemporary discussions of energy policy both in the European Union and the U.S. The deployment of distributed generation (DG) and renewable energy sources is expected to grow in coming years, and significant impacts on the operation and planning of distribution grids and, more generally, the sustainability of energy systems, are expected.

DER-CAM, the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model, has been developed and improved for more than 10 years at Berkeley Lab. The main feature of DER-CAM is its ability to determine the cost-optimal design inside one or more buildings. It chooses which DG technologies a customer should adopt and how these technologies should be operated based on specific site load, technology characteristics and price information. This makes DER-CAM the ideal software for such a project.

The Utility of the Future Program will provide a neutral framework within which to evaluate the economic, regulatory, and technological impacts of the ongoing evolution of the power sector worldwide.

The study brings together an interdisciplinary MIT Energy Initiative consortium in partnership with IIT-Comillas University. The research partners will develop scenarios of distributed energy resources (DER) technologies, business models, and regulatory environment to understand how the electricity system will change over the coming decade.

Improvements in the cost and performance of a range of distributed energy generation (DG) technologies, and the potential for breakthroughs in distributed energy storage (DS) are creating new options for on-site power generation and storage, driving increasing adoption and impacting utility distribution system operations. In addition, changing uses and use patterns for electricity–from plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) to demand response (DR)–are altering demands on the electric power system.

To this end, the research partners will use DER-CAM to simulate technical capabilities and economic and environmental benefits associated with the provision of energy services based on distributed energy resources—including distributed generation, distributed energy storage, electric vehicles and demand response—that will allow the creation and proliferation of new business models.

DER-CAM will also help assess NG-fuelled distributed generation technologies from an economic point of view, identify the most attractive areas of application and understand the opportunities to increased natural gas utilization in distributed generation applications. Indeed, the developments observed in the electric power sector offer both opportunities and challenges for natural gas utilization in DG applications like co-generation, which will provide a bound between gas and electricity systems.

The Microgrids group at Berkeley Lab is looking forward to this partnership, which will start the week of July 14 with the arrival of students from both universities in Berkeley to be trained on DER-CAM by EETD staff.

The duration of the project is expected to be two years. Some of the researchers include Professor José Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga (co-PI, MIT), Stephen Connors (Senior Research Scientist, MIT) and Pablo Frías (Professor, IIT-Comillas University) among others.

Dr. José Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga
Visiting Professor, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), MIT
Professor and Director of the BP Chair on Energy & Sustainability, Instituto de Investigacion Tecnologica (IIT), Universidad Pontificia Comillas

Stephen Connors
Head, Analysis Group for Regional Energy Alternatives (AGREA); Director, AGS Energy Flagship Program
MIT Energy Initiative

Dr. Pablo Frías
Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Engineering School of Universidad Pontificia Comillas.

Contact

Karen Tapia-Ahumada, GTI-MIT Energy Fellow, [email protected]

Tomás Gómez, Professor at IIT Comillas, [email protected]

Michael Stadler, Microgrids Group at Berkeley Lab, [email protected]

Author

Daphne Baldassari