FLC | With NREL technology, every home can be its own power plant

With NREL technology, every home can be its own power plant

April 29, 2020

Basalt Vista, a new affordable housing project in the small town of Basalt, Colorado, is a living laboratory to test advanced power grid technologies developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that could turn every home into an appendage of a decentralized power plant.

Basalt Vista is designed to be an all-electric community that produces as much power as it uses. Each home comes with an electric vehicle charger in the garage, a large battery pack in the basement, and a roof covered with solar panels. The homes are linked together as a microgrid, a self-contained electricity distribution network that can operate independently of the regional electric grid.

But what makes Basalt Vista's microgrid unique is that it autonomously allocates power. An internet-connected control box in the basement of each home runs experimental software that continuously optimizes electricity distribution across the microgrid, as well as the flow of energy to and from the larger regional grid. If one home produces more energy than it needs, the system can autonomously decide to redistribute that energy to neighbors or store it for later.

These features make the community's microgrid more of a "virtual power plant" that is not intended to be disconnected from a larger power grid. If the Basalt Vista experiment is successful, a larger version of this type of system may one day control power for millions of families.

"Traditionally we've delivered electric service over a one-way transmission and distribution grid from centralized power plants to relatively passive consumers," said Bryan Hannegan, CEO of Holy Cross Energy, a small nonprofit utility that services Basalt. "That architecture is changing dramatically and consumers are now producing as well. Power plants are no longer large and centralized; they're numerous and distributed."

Before joining Holy Cross, Hannegan was the founding director of the NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility. For Hannegan and his colleagues there, it was clear that to create an electricity supply that is clean, resilient, and efficient, the grid of the future will need to largely manage itself.

In 2016, the Department of Energy awarded NREL a $4.2 million grant to develop autonomous grid control software as part of its Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems (NODES) program. The software's algorithms, which turn a power grid into a two-way street, was designed for handling tens of thousands of energy systems. But what works in the lab won't necessarily be able to handle the random variables associated with real life. Field testing began with a small vineyard in California, and later was installed in the first four houses built at Basalt Vista.

Holy Cross' embrace of autonomous grid control software shows that distributed renewable energy systems can augment electric utilities rather than threaten them. So far, the promising results from Basalt Vista and similar autonomous energy systems in Utah and Vermont suggest the possibility of a future where every house can also be a power plant.