SMART GRID: Project Center

G R I D

Director: Jason Dedrick R esearchers here look at the impact of merging information technologies with the electric grid, the challenges involved in integrating smart meter technologies and the impact of those actions on consumer perception and behavior. Research projects undertaken and underway include:

SMART GRID ADOPTION Adoption of Smart Grid Technologies by Electrical Utilities: Factors Influencing Organizational Innovation in a Regulated Environment (National Science Foundation, $341,190) Smart grid technologies can reduce environmental impacts of electricity generation and distribution while improving the quality, reliability and efficiency of electricity supply. Because utilities operate in highly regulated environments, this innovation presents major organizational and technical challenges. This project has explored issues regarding innovative technologies and development and testing of a new model of organizational adoption.

Principal investigator: Professor Jason Dedrick; co-principal investigators Professor Jeffrey Stanton and Associate Professor Murali Venakatesh. Data Privacy for Smart Meter Data: A Scenario-Based Study (National Science Foundation EAGER award, $266,101, 2014 – 2017) Smart electric meters are a key technology in modernizing the nation’s energy infrastructure, and they also can drive energy use and demand forecasting and control models. While smart meters capture energy use, the spectre of how that data may be used can create powerful customer privacy concerns. This project has looked at various data use and protection scenarios and dimensions of privacy concerns to assess what situations provide the highest level of acceptability to consumers.

BIG DATA ANALYSIS OF HOUSEHOLD ELECTRICITY USE iSchool researchers have been analyzing big data sets from the Pecan Street Research Consortium, a global collaboration working on utility system operations, climate change, integration of distributed energy and storage and customer needs and preferences. The analysis ultimately has the potential to launch industry-wide changes in the way consumers use and pay for energy, how utilities plan peak usage and how the grid system can be optimized.

Researchers are using huge, open-source data sets of timestamped electricity records from the project’s original field research. Participation is facilitated by the iSchool’s on-site IBM System Z mainframe computer capacity.

Principal investigator is Professor Jason Dedrick; co-principal investigators Professor Jeffrey Stanton and Associate Professor Murali Venkatesh.

SECURE AND TRUSTWORTHY CYBERSPACE Cybersecurity Risks of Dynamic, Two-Way Distributed Electricity Markets (National Science Foundation, $344,184, 2016 – 2019) As the U.S. electric grid transforms from a one-way delivery channel to a distributed grid with two-way flows of information and electricity, consumers can become buyers and sellers in the market. That can help utilities reduce costly peak loads and outage risks, and firms can benefit from innovation, but such benefits can come with significant cybersecurity and privacy risks.

This research identifies potential security and privacy risks associated with distributed electricity markets and defines acceptable levels of risk and trade-offs between risk reduction and performance of distributed markets. The project will provide guidance to utilities, regulators and others regarding balancing robust market structures with security and privacy protection.

Principal investigator: Professor Jason Dedrick of the iSchool; co-principal investigators: Professor Peter Wilcoxen (SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs) and Associate Professor Steve Chapin (SU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science) and Keli Perrin (SU’s College of Law Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism).

ELECTRICITY MARKET MODELING Community Energy: Technical and Social Challenges and Integrative Solutions (National Science Foundation, $99,965, 2017 – 2019, with additional support from the Syracuse Center of Excellence) The concept of community energy involves integrating small-scale solar power, demand management and energy storage at the community level. Those efforts can create economic, environmental and social value for individuals and communities and improve reliability and resilience of the electric grid. Outstanding issues include perceptions of economic and behavioral incentives in a community context; how residents and other stakeholders view the concept and how data can be analyzed to promote participation. This planning project brings residents and stakeholders together in a smart grid community to create knowledge and tools to develop a program model for other U.S. communities.

Principal investigator: Professor Jason Dedrick of the iSchool; co-principal investigators Tarek Rakha and ElizabethKrietemeyer, assistant professors at the SU School of Architecture. (See article on page 22.) VIS-SIM: A Framework for Designing Neighborhood Energy Efficiency ThroughData Visualization and Calibrated Urban Building Energy Simulation (Syracuse Center of Excellence, $24,997, 2016-2017) This research visualizes the relationships between electric grid functioning (and how it can be made cleaner, more efficient and more resilient); the use of energy by buildings (and how to minimize it while increasing functionality and comfort for occupants); and the dynamic external available natural resources of solar and wind energy for matching resource with demand. It uses energy-use datasets from the Pecan Street Institute with visualization techniques and urban building simulation tools to develop, simulate, test and visualize future scenarios and strategies.

Investigators are Elizabeth Kreitemeyer and Tarek Rakha, assistant professors at the SU School of Architecture; Lorne Covington, of Noir Flux; and Jason Dedrick, professor at the iSchool. Climate-specific Assessment of LEED for Neighborhood Development: Energy, Comfort, Walkability and Design Analysis of the Mueller Neighborhood of Austin, Texas (Sponsored by the Sustainable Enterprise partnership and the U.S. Green Building Council, 2017, $19,000.) This research aims to expand the research team’s urban building energy model to assess the climate-specific environmental, comfort, and design impacts of the USGBC rating system.

Investigators are: Assistant Professors Elizabeth Kreitemeyer and Tarek Rakha of the SU School of Architecture and Professor Jason Dedrick of the iSchool. Note: some of the Smart Grid research projects also are funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Principal investigator: ProfessorJason Dedrick; Co-Principal Investigator Jeffrey Stanton.