When you’re working with innovative technology at the grid edge, things don’t always go as predicted. Mathematics and modeling can only take you so far before the technology needs to face the real world and all the chaos and randomness that comes with it. Trouble is, the real world for grid management technology is the electrical grid, and the utilities and system operators responsible for it don’t tend to allow science experiments on it.
This puts innovations that could move the energy transition forward at a disadvantage as utilities and grid operators go with what’s tried and tested and often default to traditional means of management and control.
Raymond de Callafon sees the challenges firsthand as he works across two spheres in the field of electrical engineering: academia and commercial development. A Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professor with UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Raymond splits his time between teaching a new generation about the 21st century grid and developing software solutions to manage that grid in his other role as System Architect for PXiSE Energy Solutions.
Focused on issues related to modernizing the electric grid to accommodate distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, battery energy storage systems, and electric vehicles, Raymond is eager for the transition to renewable energy to be complete but sees how the lack of standards and proven solutions are hampering progress in a nascent industry.
That’s why he’s excited about the knowledge that will be gained through the DERConnect project. “The solutions coming out of the DERConnect lab will help us understand what we can do to make grid decarbonization a reality,” said de Callafon. “There are so many uncertainties related to new hardware and no one wants to risk testing on their own grid.”
Those uncertainties can be put to the test in the new DERConnect lab located on the University of California San Diego’s campus and led by Professor Jan Kleissl, the program’s Principal Investigator. The goal of the grid tech sandbox is to help industry and academic researchers better understand how to integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) into the grid. With access to 2,500 actual and 2 million simulated nodes, plus the ability to plug into the testbed remotely, DERConnect provides a testing facility that would be too costly for most cleantech startups to develop on their own.
As part of the DERConnect project team, de Callafon emphasizes the advantages the lab offers in accelerating the energy transition. “We’ll be able to test challenging grid operation tasks like inverters switching from grid-following to grid-forming mode and opening/closing microgrid breakers while observing the related impacts of doing this on a grid with thousands of DERs. These are tests that can be simulated, but it would probably take a year to develop an accurate model. At DERConnect, you could complete the test within a couple of months,” said de Callafon.
That’s great news for grid management software developers like PXiSE Energy Solutions, which will be able to use the DERConnect lab to test previously untested configurations right in their San Diego headquarters’ back yard. As a technology-agnostic software company, PXiSE navigates novel configurations—consisting of inverters, batteries, and renewable energy generation equipment from different manufacturers on nearly every project.
“Often, we’ll be brought onto a project after the key equipment has already been selected. Understandably, customers usually want equipment with the most advanced features, and batteries with the best capabilities,” said PXiSE CEO Tim Allen, “In a nascent industry like ours, many products have not been tested with each other. Having the ability to test and troubleshoot in advance of an installation saves time, helps inform industry on where compatibility challenges lie, and helps focus new development.”
Having subject matter experts like de Callafon on staff at PXiSE is invaluable as the multi-dimensional perspectives he brings to PXiSE create a perpetually sustaining feedback loop that continually evolves PXiSE’s products and ultimately helps prepare the grid for an ever-increasing amount of renewable generation. PXiSE looks forward to the opportunity to test its products in complex and varied scenarios that will give utilities and system operators the confidence they need to embrace 21st century solutions for the 21st century grid.
