What is a “smart grid”?
Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University. pdx.edu/maseeh.
What do we mean when we talk about a smart grid?
Bob Bass, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Director of Power Engineering Lab: So smart grid technology is a suite of solutions for addressing some of the challenges that we’re facing with the power system.
Midrar Adham, PhD Candidate in Electrical Engineering, Graduate Research Assistant: The grid itself, in its current state, it’s very manual, and it doesn’t have a lot of automation. So to have everything communicate with each other, that’s where the word “smart” comes in.
Bob Bass: So renewables, for instance, they are what we call “intermittent,” and they’re also non-dispatchable, which means we can’t just turn them on and off when we want to. So if we had means for shifting energy consumption, or for storing energy within storage systems, that would allow us to take advantage of these extremely inexpensive energy generation sources.
Why does having a smart grid matter?
Dana Paresa, Master’s student, Graduate Research Assistant: Because if we don’t address the changing environment of the grid, then it just won’t work anymore. It won’t work how we expect it to, it won’t be as reliable or resilient. So right now, there’s lots of congestion because everything’s becoming electric. So how can we work with things that are already connected to the grid, so that we could all still drive our cars, we could all still wash our clothes, we could all still take hot showers.
How is your lab working to build the future of smart grid technology?
Bob Bass: Yeah, so one of the problems that we’re working on is related to electric vehicles. When you charge an electric vehicle, it consumes a tremendous amount of energy. So, it’s kind of like having eight to ten toasters on at a time for five hours straight. So one of the things that we’re working on is a monitoring system that sits on top of that transformer and looks for signs that that transformer might be stressed out a bit. And then that transformer device can then communicate with the electric vehicle and can ask it if it’s willing to, maybe, tone it down a bit and consume a little less power for the time being. So that’s one of the things we’re pretty excited about.
Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University
Thank you for watching! Learn more at pdx.edu/maseeh/power-energy