It is an efficient way to convert wind and sun into transportation, says Zachary Graham, a Ph.D. The Triac will be charged by renewable energy sources, plugging into stations that are fed by wind turbines and solar collectors. “It is like a three-wheeled golf cart that goes 80 miles per hour,” he says. He chose it primarily because of its large, 25-kilowatt-hour battery. Three years ago, Kubby bought a three-wheeled EV called a Triac. The EV and its smart-battery management system could serve both functions for the nanogrid, says Kubby. “The smaller ‘nanogrid’ is a system just large enough to run a single home.” Both micro- and nano-scale grids must have some storage capacity and be equipped to manage the fluctuation of energy sources, prices, and demands throughout the day. “A ‘microgrid’ is a campus-scale network of energy supply inputs and users,” says Kubby. The research can have a big effect, but the application is on a small scale. This mandate should prove a valuable impetus in fueling the growth of electric vehicles and in research using their batteries as storage devices. In 2012, Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order that established the goal of 1.5 million zero-emission cars on the state’s roads in by 2025 and for all cars to be zero emission by 2050. He and his colleagues are working toward that goal using a 25kw, three-wheeled electric vehicle (EV), which Kubby calls “a big battery pack on wheels.” With help from a 2011 CITRIS seed grant, they are installing an EV recharge station and developing a smart-battery management interface system to integrate the car into their nanogrid testbed.
#Homer energy legacy portable#
The state’s hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles could be efficient and portable sources of energy storage if they can be woven into the grid, says Joel Kubby, Associate Professor of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Software is being developed for an artificial neural network that can be used to forecast energy production and to learn energy consumption patterns in the nanogrid so that it can automatically balance production, consumption, and storage. The testbed uses an electric vehicle for energy storage and transportation, and a recharging station for the vehicle. They have designed and implemented a testbed at the NASA Ames Research Center based on a project held jointly between UCSC and Denmark. The researchers are creating the necessary facilities to experiment and test solutions to the challenges of a nanogrid-based society. A nation of nanogrids could help solve some of our energy challenges, but it would require new infrastructure to monitor and administer that power exchange. This single home set-up is known as a nanogrid-a tiny version of the massive power grid structures that are so prevalent today. The homes can also become power brokers, storing energy in batter arrays or electric vehicles and then selling power back to the grid when it is needed. This project is based on the idea that, as solar panels and wind energy become more common, individual houses can both produce and consume renewable energy.