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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Emerging class of sensors will be key to energy monitoring, management
By Rodney H. Brown
MHT's Galen Moore: N.E. firms target individual carbon footprints
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Preparing the smart grid for more power
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Solar installation booms in New England
Being able to control your carbon footprint starts with knowing what it is. But even knowledge does no good for anyone, commercial or residential, if it’s impossible for users to change their energy use.
That is why a handful of local businesses and researchers are developing new technologies that run the gamut from sensors through networking to control systems, all aimed at helping you keep your energy costs and environmental impact in check.
At the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories Inc. in Cambridge, researchers are focusing on new technologies for the entire grid — from power generators to power distributors to the home or business user. According to Len Polizzotto, principal director of strategic business development at Draper, half of all of the electricity generated in the United States comes from coal, so Draper is focusing on ways to make those power plants more efficient and cleaner.
“A lot of our coal plants were built in the ’50s and ’60s, and some of the things that they could really benefit from are new sensors,” Polizzotto said.
Draper is working on sensors that determine a metric called “loss on ignition,” or LOI. In the coal power industry, LOI relates to how much unburned coal winds up in the fly ash that results from the burning process. More unburned coal means a less efficient, more polluting power plant.
One of the big problems they are solving is that the fly ash has to be captured in the smokestack, an environment that kills most electronic products. Draper is first making a sturdy sampler to capture the fly ash, which will be analyzed later using thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) equipment — but the ultimate goal is to have the analysis sensors built right into the sampler, delivering real-time data back to the control system. Draper has some pilot versions of more rugged sensor systems in place, thanks to some local business friends.
“We actually got PerkinElmer to give us a lab TGA that we hooked up to the sensors and we get a reading every half hour,” Polizzotto said.
With that data in hand, the power plant can adjust its mixture of fuel and air, much in the way the computer in a car adjusts air intake and fuel injectors to increase performance or efficiency.
The next step in that power plant system is to create automated control systems, so that — again, like a car — the mixture can be adjusted automatically based on preset parameters. That is also the next step that a startup, Gloucester’s GroundedPower Inc., is looking at, for homes and businesses.
GroundedPower is bypassing any smart-meter installation by making a monitor that clamps on the transformer and wirelessly sends power usage data for the home or building back to a utility, according to Mike Bukhin, vice president of engineering at GroundedPower. In fact, like Draper, GroundedPower has everything a building needs for energy monitoring, including a way to get the data back to the utility.
“We have a gateway that uses the customer’s broadband, because there isn’t a lot of connectivity yet,” Bukhin said.
Once that data gets out to the Internet, GroundedPower also makes what it calls the Interactive Customer Engagement System (iCES), a web portal and data analysis site.
GroundedPower is looking to develop systems that will enable building managers or homeowners to adjust their energy usage, either manually through the iCES portal, or automatically based on preset values. That hasn’t happened yet. Bukhin said, “The technology is not there yet, and the customer perception isn’t there yet.”
Much of the surge in research is being driven by the federal government’s funding push through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to move toward the smart grid, although Polizzotto is not a fan of the term. “Frankly, I don’t know what a smart grid means, because if you ask 10 people you get 10 different answers,” he said.
There are problems in putting solar and wind power onto the grid, the biggest being inconsistency. That leads to a need for storage systems, which can be expensive for a single household. So Draper’s plan is to connect five or six houses in a “micro-grid” that shares storage and feeds power back to the grid from renewable sources as a block.
Still, even with federal dollars in the mix, finding funds is a full-time job for people like Polizzotto.
For its part, Draper is focused on bringing its tech to deployment as rapidly as possible, and it has partnered with universities and their researchers to speed the development cycle.
Among its education partners are Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, the University of South Florida and the University of Montana. Those partnerships are helping Draper gather the funds it needs, but the money flow is pretty small for such a large potential return, according to Polizzotto.
“We’re groveling in front of everybody because without that funding we can’t do anything,” he said. “That’s my biggest challenge.”
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