A company founded by two former executives of power-grid operator PJM Interconnection has gotten the green light to demonstrate its smart-grid technology on the campus of Drexel University.
Viridity Energy Inc., which was started last year by its president and CEO, Audrey Zibelman, and its chief technology officer, Alain P. Steven, will deploy its VPower System at three buildings on Drexel’s campus in January.
Viridity also will work with the Power Resources Department in Drexel’s College of Engineering to improve its system, which uses power-management software developed by the energy unit of German conglomerate Siemens AG.
Siemens developed the software as part of a partnership with German power-plant operator RWE Energy aimed at enabling multiple generation facilities to be run as a single entity called a virtual power plant.
Running multiple plants as a system enables their owners to run them more efficiently. It also gives them more possible customers for the power the plants produce. Those things are particularly true if the plants are small, as is often the case with plants that use such green energy sources as biomass, wind or the sun.
In Viridity’s hands, Siemens’ software will become the heart of a networking system that uses multiple factors to manage the power consumption of multiple buildings so that the buildings consume the least amount of electricity and their owners can buy power for them at the cheapest possible rates.
Factors the system takes into account include weather forecasts, prices on the various power markets, planned usages of the buildings and the preferences of the buildings’ owners.
For example, Zibelman said, a building’s owner may want it chilled to 72 degrees in the summer if electricity costs a certain amount, but only want it chilled to 75 degrees if the price of power exceeds that amount.
via Viridity’s smart-grid science will be tested out at Drexel – Philadelphia Business Journal:.
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