Colorado Springs Utilities has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to pursue a project under which the public power utility will partner with NREL to test a section of its grid where a small-scale microgrid is planned for its Mesa Campus, which includes renewable energy sources such as solar, battery energy storage systems, and a public EV charging station.
The hope is to determine the impacts additional energy demands, like EV charging stations, have on the microgrid and surrounding community and to test backup plans in case of power disruptions, NREL said.
To do this, Colorado Springs Utilities is teaming up with NREL to use Smarter Grid Solutions’ Strata Grid technology to test different scenarios to help Springs Utilities assess scenarios of high demand on the grid.
“We believe that the insights gained from these simulations will help us better prepare for the future,” said Brett Jackson, the microgrid project manager at Colorado Springs Utilities. “This information will help ensure that we’re making informed decisions about energy resilience in Colorado Springs and how we can best invest customers’ rate dollars in our electric grid.”
A second project selected by DOE involves Dominion Energy using technology from Generac Grid Solutions.
Both teams will demonstrate ways distribution utilities can adapt as more of their customers drive and charge electric vehicles (EVs), adding load to the grid. The demonstrations will use NREL’s Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) Test Bed, “a safe environment to de-risk and build confidence in interconnecting new technologies to the power system. Partners experiment with plug-and-play options in the lab before deployment in the field,” NREL said.
Dominion Energy is deploying Generac’s Concerto distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) across its service territory in Virginia and North Carolina to support EV owners and electric school buses, as well as customers with solar photovoltaics, battery storage, and other DER technologies.
“NREL’s ADMS Test Bed provides a realistic environment in which to demonstrate the ability of the DERMS to manage EV charging in real time and thereby de-risk our field deployment,” explained Santosh Veda, manager of DERMS at Dominion Energy. The utility also wants to simulate future scenarios to observe DERMS performance as the numbers of EVs and EV aggregators continue to grow. “DERMS deployment is an important part of Dominion’s Grid Transformation Plan for meeting the trend of increased electrification,” Veda said.
