ACE Students Get Charged-Up on Smart Grid Tour
On Tuesday, March 25th, students participating in Armour College of Engineering’s Distinctive Education program were given a behind the scenes tour of the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation. The Galvin Center at Illinois Institute of Technology is part of a major university initiative to improve the reliability, security, efficiency, and sustainability of the nation’s electrical grid and overcome obstacles to the effective adoption and implementation of the Smart Grid. Each student attending the tour received Energy Themes credit.
The Galvin Center is a state-of-the-art facility designed to house microgrid research, demonstration, and education activities. Located on the 16th floor of the IIT Tower, the 16,000-square-foot center contains offices, exhibition rooms, classrooms and student workrooms, acting as a hands-on experience center for Smart Grid, microgrid and energy technology and education. The $3 million project was funded by the State of Illinois, U.S. Department of Energy and IIT.
The Galvin Center partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy to build the first-ever Perfect Power microgrid – an electric system that will not fail – at IIT’s main campus in Chicago. The revolutionary smart microgrid is designed to eliminate blackouts, cut its peak load by 20 percent and integrate more distributed renewable energy resources.
Students were able to look at a large model of the IIT Main Campus that showed the different components that make up the microgrid on campus. Some interesting features that were highlighted on the model were the wind turbine on campus, the solar charging stations, the campus power plant, and the battery units used to store energy when its not being used.
Next on the tour was the “control center” where data is spread across several large screens. In this room everything from the weather to the price of natural gas used to produce electricity in some power plants is monitored in real-time in order to more efficiently distribute the available electricity across the grid at any given time.
The last stop on the tour was a room full of smart devices that can communicate with each other and the grid to be more efficient. A few items shown were an electric car charging station and household appliances that could be programmed to turn on when the price of electricity is at its lowest. The students also got to look at a control system for the homes that can be fully automated and controlled by any device connected to the internet.
This informative tour gave students a look into the high-tech future of the electrical grid.
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