Lead Performer: Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Oak Ridge, TN
September 12, 2017
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Lead Performer: Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Oak Ridge, TN
Partners:
-- Emerson – St. Louis, MO
-- Southern Company – Atlanta, GA
DOE Total Funding: $2,000,000
Cost Share: $300,000
Project Term: March 1, 2016 – September 30, 2018
Funding Opportunity: DOE Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC) Lab Call
Project Objective
As a part of the Department of Energy’s Grid Modernization Initiative, the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium projects represent a comprehensive portfolio of critical research and development in advanced storage systems, standards and test procedures, and a number of other key grid modernization areas.
Buildings consume approximately 40% of energy produced in the U.S. Existing, installed sensors and controls have demonstrated potential to reduce building energy consumption by 20-30% through dispatch of better control applications and logic. These savings can be realized in the existing building stock only though retrofit solutions and the application of complex control solutions to existing, installed equipment. To facilitate adoption of these concepts, this project will develop low-cost, “low-touch” retrofit control technologies (through supervisory control methods) to connect building loads by enabling information exchange across the meter. This project targets improvement in the energy efficiency of rooftop units and supermarket refrigeration systems – systems that can provide “virtual storage” capacities to the grid (far cheaper than comparative electrochemical storage).
Project Impact
Developing a retrofit system for coordinating the operation of multiple buildings loads can reduce peak demand, reduce energy consumption, and provide transactive energy services to the electric grid through the development of unified control logic, supervisory control methods, and priority based control logic – all subsets of complex control science.
Contacts
DOE Technology Manager: Joe Hagerman
Principal Investigator: Teja Kuruganti, ORNL