Sessions

Refrigerated C&I warehouses spend over $40 billion on electricity annually and energy often accounts for up to 70% of the total electric bill at cold storage facilities. Low-temperature cold storage facilities have the highest demand per cubic foot of any industrial load and consume more energy than any usage category other than lighting and HVAC. Long-duration Thermal Energy Storage (TES) technology sits behind the meter and leverages the heat transference properties of phase change material and intelligent controls to reduce energy consumption and shift the demand for ~13 hours daily while better maintaining stable freezer temperatures.  This presentation will discuss energy demand in cold storage facilities, the benefits of TES for warehouses, the grid, and utilities, and cover incentive programs.

The fostering and nurturing of young talent is a central pillar of Initiate, whether an undergraduate or postgraduate student or a young professional at the beginning of their career.

Join us for the POWERGEN & DISTRIBUTECH Joint Networking Party, Power Play. Network with your industry peers at our sports-themed event.

Technological innovations are driving the widespread deployment of solar plus storage (solar plus) and controllable loads. Coordinated deployment of these technologies can provide a variety of grid services including load, voltage, and frequency management. Maximizing the value of solar plus entails coordinating or orchestrating various load and output shifts through some type of centralized energy management system. A growing body of literature demonstrates the potential technical and economic value of solar plus but data-driven studies based on deployed solar plus systems are lacking. NREL has conducted an analysis of real-world data from the 3,000 solar plus homes at the Jasper Valley project in Arizona. NREL assessed the impacts of consumer behavior, home architecture, and rate design on the value delivered by solar plus homes to the distribution grid including infrastructure deferral. These real-world data were then leveraged to identify a cost reduction roadmap for similar virtual power plants (VPPs) or distributed energy resource (DER) aggregation programs to maximize deployment nationwide. In this presentation, NREL will explain how utilities can better model the impact of similar new construction projects that can reduce infrastructure requirements while providing new resources to help increase the flexibility of the distribution grid. NREL will identify opportunities and barriers to maximizing the use of VPPs nationwide and will conclude with best practices for maximizing solar plus homes benefits to the electrical grid.

Reliable power system operation with 100% inverter-based renewable generation is an unsolved and challenging problem. The main reason is that today’s power systems require that at least 25% of the load is supplied by synchronous generators at any time, e.g., gas turbines, steam turbines, or diesel generators, as documented in studies for Hawaii and Ireland. One of the most challenging factors for achieving reliable operation with 100% inverter-based renewable generation is power system stability after N-1 contingencies. This roadblock for high renewable generation can be overcome using Dynamic Security Optimization (DSO) technology for tuning controller parameters of generation units in order to improve the dynamic security of the power system. This presentation will provide an overview of the developed technology and first results from the U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E funded project with Hawaiian Electric’s, Hawai`i Island Service Territory (HECO), OPAL-RT, and PNNL. The Dynamic Security Optimization technology is unique because it allows, for the first time, reliable power system operation with 100% inverter-based renewable generation in a transmission system.

Join us for the Initiate awards, where Clarion Events will announce 3 winners and Duke Energy will announce one 1-to 3 winners from the startup pitch competition.

Sponsored by Quest Global: While implementing VPP, beyond a pilot project, the data ingestion becomes a challenge due to the volume, latency, and the nature of disparate sources from which the data needs to be acquired. This high-volume data could be flowing in from millions of smart meters, thousands of gateways/edge devices/data concentrators / OT & IT systems supplied by multiple vendors, which may be supporting different protocols and data structures.  Also, maximum latency, and efficient VPP can afford depending on region-specific compliance, could be in the order of seconds which makes the whole data ingestion implementation complex. There are various technology options available today to address this data ingestion problem along with needed data formatting and data storage needs in a VPP platform implemented on cloud-native technologies. The combination of technologies needs to be chosen carefully depending on performance requirements, security, cost, availability in the chosen cloud platform, etc. In this session, we share some of the lessons learned during the implementation of VPP on different cloud platforms.