The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will award up to $6.5 million in federal funds to five recipients to address the challenge of enabling the electric grid to handle increasing amounts of renewable energy.
NREL is managing the Integrated Network Testbed for Energy Grid Research and Technology Experimentation (INTEGRATE), and all of the teams will test their technologies in NREL's megawatt-scale Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF).
‘Advanced control systems, smart consumer devices, energy storage and emerging communications technologies will combine to help the grid run more reliably and efficiently,’ says Bryan Hannegan, NREL's associate director for energy systems integration. ‘Working together, NREL and our INTEGRATE partners can use ESIF's capabilities to help accelerate this modernization of our electric grid and enable a clean, affordable and reliable energy future.’
NREL says the objective of the INTEGRATE project is to provide grid services using an open-source, interoperable platform that would allow renewable energy systems and other clean energy technologies to be connected to a ‘smart’ power grid in a ‘plug and play’ manner – similar to how computers allow users to plug in new devices and connect automatically to the device. Smart power grids include communication technologies to make the grid easier to monitor and control.
The five project recipients include efforts to show how electric vehicles can provide energy storage support to the power grid electric vehicles to grid storage and how small-scale consumer equipment and large-scale utility equipment can work together.
For a full list of winners, click here.
http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2015/18515.html
