The FREEDM Systems Center is pleased to announce the publication of our fourth year annual report.

The annual report comes in two volumes and is presented annually to both members of the center and to the NSF in advance of their annual review. Members of the center can log in to the intranet and access the annual report here.

Volume I of the report contains critical information on the various programmatic functions of the center including the Research, Education, and Industry and Innovation Programs. Volume II of the annual report includes specific project reports for both core and associated research projects.

The annual report encompasses the progress of the entire center and represents the tremendous efforts of all of the Faculty, Staff, Students, and Industry of the center over the fourth year of existence as an NSF ERC.

Advanced substation automation products from ABB to help engineering students with critical energy research and technological innovation, strengthening a close partnership between ABB and North Carolina State University.

ABB, ( NYSE:ABB) the leading power and automation technology group, today announced it has provided new, state-of-the-art substation automation products to the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management Systems Center – the FREEDM Systems Center – at North Carolina State University.

This donation of Relion® Family protection and control devices, MicroSCADA Pro® substation automation control and small SCADA systems and remote terminal units, as well as support and training of various power hardware and software for FREEDM researchers, will allow engineering students and researchers at the FREEDM Systems Center to step up testing and feasibility of new, “smart grid” compliant solutions based on the IEC 61850 communication standards, and to integrate new functionality into existing power grid equipment.

“We are grateful to ABB for their generous donation of substation relays and power electronics equipment,” said Dr. Alex Huang, Director, FREEDM Systems Center. “This equipment will allow our students and our researchers to take our Green Energy Hub research and technology demonstration laboratory to a higher level as we continue to help shape America’s power grid for the needs of the 21st century.”

The donation, valued at around $130,000, strengthens what is already a solid, long-term partnership between ABB and NC State University. ABB’s Power Products and Power Systems division North American headquarters, along with the ABB US Corporate Research Center and the new ABB Smart Grid Center of Excellence, are all located on NC State’s Centennial Campus. ABB was the original anchor tenant on Centennial Campus, going back to 1990.

Additionally, ABB last year made a gift creating $1.2 million in initiatives that helped create a new Endowed Professorship with NC State’s College of Engineering, as well as an ABB Power Engineering Scholarship program, offering five awards annually to students taking power engineering classes.

“We are pleased to provide the advanced substation automation solutions to NC State’s FREEDM Center as they continue their world-class research initiatives in modernizing the power grid,” said Steven Kunsman, Vice President and General Manager for ABB’s Substation Automation Products in North America. “Today’s substation automation products supporting high speed standardized communication architectures will allow research of advanced automation schemes supporting the FREEDM Center’s Smart Grid and MicroGrid development of new innovations related to renewable energy sources, electric vehicles and other forward-thinking 21st century technologies.”

ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 135,000 people. The company's North American operations, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, employ about 20,000 people in multiple manufacturing, service and other major facilities.

For more information, please contact: 
Bill Rose, ABB Media Relations 
919-807-5743 – office
919-244-4879 – mobile
bill.rose@us.abb.com

Congratulations to the following individuals for being awarded the NSF ERC FREEDM Systems Center Graduate Fellowships for 2012!

James McLamara, an electrical engineering Ph.D. student guided by Dr. Alex Huang of NC State, and David Kelle, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student guided by Dr. Chris Edrington and Dr. Sanjeev Srivastava at Florida State University, received full $30,000 fellowships to begin their doctoral research with FREEDM Fall 2012.

Tom Roth, a computer science Ph.D. student guided by Dr. Bruce McMillin of Missouri S&T, and Eric Green, an electrical engineering Ph.D. student guided by Dr. Subhashish Bhattacharya of NC State received supplemental $5,000 fellowships.

Congratulations and we look forward to working with these brilliant doctoral students!

Previous award recipients can be seen here.

Story originally from the IBM Asset Management blog.

Everyone is talking about smaller carbon footprints, green energy, sustainability and visions of smarter cities on a smarter planet. But is it really achievable or is it just the latest vision to make us all become better citizens? That is what I set out to investigate for today's blog.

We've all heard that real estate is the 2nd largest expense on the balance sheet for most companies & that by 2025 buildings will be the #1 consumer of energy, but what really gets me is that an estimated 50% of energy and water in buildings is often wasted. That coupled with varying electric pricing to compensate for peak utilization should be enough for everyone to start realizing that our current path of utilization is not sustainable.

Knowing that solutions from IBM including Maximo Asset Management, Intelligent Building Management and all of the TRIRIGA solutions from the recent acquisition are helping clients to build smarter cities, starting with smarter buildings, I decided to preview a client success story that would be featured at IBM Pulse 2012.

I reached out to Dr. Bill Winner, a professor from North Carolina State University (NCSU) to learn more about what's going on at NCSU. I learned quickly that at NCSU they are doing more than just talking, they are leading discussions with more than 70 businesses in Research Triangle Park, NC around smarter grids, smarter campuses and smarter cities at the 9th annual Sustainable Energy Conference. Their goals go beyond just making NCSU a renowned "Smarter City" that you see from the airport, they want to help advance sustainability and technology across the globe. As Bill put it "the nations that get this right will be the global leaders supplying the others".

To get an overview of IBM's partnership with NCSU at the FREEDM Systems Center and the overall Energy-Management, Sustainability Solutions for Smarter Enterprises announcement visit: http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32586.wss

[Listen to how Bill summed up the vision to advance sustainability across the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL9OmU8nFgc.]

[It's easy to see that Bill is passionate about this and eager to share more of the story. Here's his personal invitation for you to attend the "Campus Smarter Buildings Panel - the Model for Smarter Cities" session 1575 at Pulse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_xhTdeoG6c.]

Stay tuned for future blog installments where I dive deeper into the IBM partnership with NCSU at the FREEDM Systems Center.......on a mission to build a smarter city, 1 building at a time.

The original story can be found on the IBM Asset Management blog post.

Story originally from the NC Sustainable Energy Association.

Energy experts from across the sector convened at the 2012 FREEDM Industry Summit on Jan. 31 to explore the benefits and challenges of upgrading the country's electric power grid. Panelists at the second day of the FREEDM Systems Center event included utility executives and technology leaders who discussed the consumer value and business opportunities of grid modernization. The two-day event, at the McKimmon Center on NC State University’s campus, also featured a review of the FREEDM Systems Center's research that focuses on integrating renewables energy into a smart grid.

Cutting-edge technology, the retirement of coal plants and increases in renewable energy generation has lead traditional energy providers to consider the most effective ways of enhancing the aging power grid. The experts at day two of the summit addressed issues of power storage, reliability, transmission, interconnection, distribution and metering. Emerging technologies, such as synchronized phasor measurements or synchrophasors, extract value for consumers and service providers by collecting and measuring real-time information. The addition of synchrophasors to electricity substations has the potential to increase the amount of energy that can reliably be transmitted on the high-voltage grid.

The day when renewable energy is part of the “least cost” utility electricity portfolio without incentives is fast arriving. The North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association has documented these dramatic cost declines occurring statewide in renewable energy. Preparing for when North Carolina customers will be getting more than 15 percent of their energy from renewable resources, this will allow for more integration of renewable energy such as wind and solar power. "The generation mix is changing," said Matthew Gardner, an engineer with Dominion Virginia Power. "That change in generation is necessitating the changes in the way we do transmission."

Incorporating these new technologies into the grid, while training a new generation of energy workers will not only improve reliability. It will also create jobs and continue to fuel the energy economy. "The grid is very much an economic driver," said Progress Energy Smart Grid Director Becky Harrison, who sat on the “Utility and End-User Value Proposition” panel.

Consumers favor comfort, convenience, reliability and predictability of their electricity bills, said Raiford Smith of Duke Energy. Choice is another factor driving consumers’ needs. Some consumers seek to be more energy efficient while others want to use power as they see fit. As electricity rates and total energy bills continue to rise into the foreseeable future, the number of North Carolina utility customers wanting more control over their energy usage through energy efficiency and supply through renewable energy is growing rapidly. Modernizing the grid means informing and empowering consumers so they can make knowledgeable choices about their usage. NCSEA continues to raise awareness that the utilities are in a race against their own rising costs. NCSEA continues to work where possible with utilities, industry and government on education, policy and regulation to ensure everyone benefits from a smarter grid and a cleaner, resilient, more affordable and economically prosperous energy future.

"We need to educate the public," said Ed White of Field2Base Inc., who moderated the panel on "Business Opportunities in Grid Modernization." "How do we bridge the gap so the public understands?"

Education of consumers, municipalities and cooperatives also plays an essential role in interconnectivity for large-scale renewable energy development, said Kenny Habul, founder of SunEnergy1, who delivered the keynote address. "There's a process of education that's moving across the country," Habul said. "This is an industry that's creating jobs."

North Carolina's tax credits and its Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, Habul said, have played a major part in the explosion of the solar industry in our state. "It's important to have a target for clean power," he said. "I am glad we have it. We should be thankful to have a REPS. We should be thankful to have the North Carolina tax credit, which is very strong."

The original story can be found on the NC Sustainable Energy Association news post.

Story originally from the NCSU Newsroom's Abstract blog.

The concept of a “smart grid” for power utilities is drawing significant interest from researchers, practitioners and governments around the globe. The benefits of making the grid smart would be immense, including improved security, reliability, sustainability, and, perhaps most importantly, more efficient use of renewable energy and storage.

So far the smart grid research community in the United States has seen promising, yet isolated, research and development in power systems, power electronics, material science, communication engineering and economics. But in order to move forward, all these efforts need to be put together to address the overarching challenges facing smart-grid development. The two most natural and compelling tools that bind all these varied aspects of a smart grid together are control and optimization.

Marija Ilic, from Carnegie Mellon University, and I are serving as the co-editors of a new book titled “Control and Optimization Methods for Electric Smart Grids,” to help coordinate these research challenges. The book contains 18 chapters written by almost 50 leading researchers in power, control and communication systems, and captures in a holistic way how tomorrow’s grid will need to be an enormously complex system in order to solve the problems that we are facing today. Literally, with every passing day, our national grid is becoming integrated with new technologies in the form of renewable energy resources, new loads in the form of smart vehicles, new sensors such as smart meters and Phasor Measurement Units, and newer mechanisms of decision-making guided by complex power market dynamics. The book aims to capture the spectrum of this exponential transformation, and at the same time present the plethora of open problems that this transformation poses for smart-grid researchers on the way ahead.

For example, a well-known yet grand challenge for the smart grid is to determine how consumers and power utilities can interact with each other in a secure way to optimize energy consumption. This is not something that power engineers can do by themselves. Applied mathematicians and statisticians will need to develop models to capture how these interactions between multiple producers and consumers can happen in real time, and whether they can lead to chaos or not. Communication engineers will need to ensure the time constraints and the security of these interactions over wireless media. Economists will be needed too – to determine the market dynamics involved in this process.

The multi-disciplinarity of smart grid research problems that need to be tackled is one of the key challenges for us. This book consolidates some of the most promising and transformative recent research done in this area so far in hopes of laying the foundation for future advances.

The original story can be found on the NCSU Newsroom's Abstract blog posting.