Smart Neighborhoods Research and Field Verification

The overarching research objective is to develop, demonstrate, and validate a scalable control framework to co-optimize energy cost, occupant comfort, grid reliability and resilience in next-generation neighborhoods that integrate renewable energy sources and energy storage solutions. The project is focused on development of two different open-architecture control platforms for transactive control in residential neighborhoods. Firstly, address building-to-grid integration of centralized microgrid generation/storage resources with controllable residential end-use loads. Secondly, integration of residential-level distributed energy resources (DERs) with controllable end-use loads and behind the meter storage. This project is performed in partnership with Alabama Power and Georgia Power.

Project Impact

The project outcome is open architecture-based transactive control algorithms to manage building-level and community-level energy management systems, leveraging investments from Southern Company, that will enable next-generation neighborhoods with distributed energy resources for improving grid resilience and reducing customer energy costs.