Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Microgrids: A New Energy Paradigm  Robert Lasseter  5/1/13 UP873  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to get to introduce to you Bob Lasseter, who received his PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1971. And it's very good thing to be a physicist or an electrical engineer coming out of the University of Pennsylvania because it was founded by Benjamin Franklin, who had some electrifying discoveries in the 1750s and was actually a member of the Royal Society when he was still a British subject. And that's what I like about the University of Pennsylvania. [LAUGHTER] He was a consulting engineer at General Electric Company until he joined UW Madison in 1980. His research interests focus on the application of power electronics to utility systems. 

This work includes microgrids, FACTS controllers, use of power electronics and distribution systems, and harmonic interactions in power electronic circuits. Professor Lasseter is the technical lead of the CERTS microgrid project. He is a life fellow of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers. He's the past chair of the IEEE working group on distributed resources and IEEE distinguished lecturer in distributed resources. Please join me in welcoming Bob Lasseter to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]  >> My wife came home and said, I was picked up by this guy and you might have to talk at the university, and I said, give me a break. [LAUGHTER] No, it was really funny. And I was supposed to be here in the winter and got distracted, but I'm really glad to be here. Now, what I want to talk about is a movement that's been going on for about, oh, 10 years now.  It really starts off with electrical power system which was really a big deal the first part of last century. 

And this represents major transmission lines, probably all of them much larger than the ones you see on the beltline. And the ability is to move power from one area to the other, but if you think back, it really brought prosperity. It brought the industrial age to this country. But what's happening, in my opinion, is that we got to start rethinking how we're going to distribute energy to everybody. And the number one reason is this: we lose two-thirds of that energy. If you look over here, we're somewhere, we were 50%, we're down to 45% coal, but it's coal, natural gas, and then there's some nuclear and there's some renewable. And then you look over on the other side, you see the loads, but this 60% just doesn't make sense. And that's sort of what started this whole field of what we call distribute energy resources. That could be generators, storage, PV, whatever it is, but it's not the big plan.  But let's look at, this is sort of our traditional power system. 

And on your left, you have generators, and they can be from, losses can be 40% to 70%. There's some high technology called combined cycle which only has 40%. But typically you're talking somewhere up to 70%. Then you go up to high voltage because it's more efficient with less losses, but you lose 1% or 2% and then you step the voltage down to take it to the customers and lose a few more percent. And this has sort of developed over the last 150 years. But now how do we deal with this? The key thing is how do you take advantage of this wasted energy? And it's very simple. You move the generation. If I take generation and move it over to this building, I have a chance of catching the waste heat now. I have a chance of moving the total efficiencies up to 70%-80% rather than sitting down at this 40% range. And I can also provide local reliability. 

If the grid goes down and I have some generation in this building, I can do some heating, I can do some cooling, and I can provide power to the building. And that's the fundamental thinking of how we get to microgrids. Now, if I sat down and said, okay, what are the things I really would like to bring to improve the system? And one is I want to better utilize the energy. I want to take advantage of that thermal energy, but I also would like to get emissions down, we don't really like global warming, I want to harvest wind and solar as much as I can, and I want to be more reliable. And I'm contending that the directions we're going can achieve these in a fairly low cost way. But notice what I put in blue here. There's no silver bullet. The last classic silver bullet was alcohol from corn, and I don't think anybody thinks of it as solving all our problems today. And so we really have alternatives and we've got to make choices. All I can do is lay out the choices. 

Now, here is an example of what we call CHP, or in this case combined cooling, heating, and power. This is the process of taking some fuel, take your list, any one of those, and then we run them through some kind of prime mover. It could be a Chevy engine. It could be a turbine. It could be a diesel. It could be fuel cells. But effectively we're converting this thermal energy effectively into a rotating mass which turns the generator which is going to provide me some local energy, let's say in this building. If I'm lucky enough, I can sell it to utility if I have an extra amount, but more important, it gives me more security and more reliability here. But the other thing I can do is I can use the waste heat. And I can make steam, hot water, but I can also cool this building. 

I can dehumidify this building. So we have the technology to pick up the 70% loss and use it more effectively. Now, here is something that was done from what we call the CHP, which means combined heat and power. There's a Department of Energy, regional ones, and this is the Midwest's in Chicago. And so you sit down and say, okay, I have a power plant, they assumed it was 23%, I mean 32% efficient, including all the transmission losses. But I also either have a boiler or a furnace in this building and it's like 80%. And I want to deliver 30 units of electricity and 45 units of heat, so we're about 50% efficient in the whole process. Now, if I go CHP, we're generating the same electricity, but now we're harvesting the waste heat and I go up to 75% efficiency. That's a big bang for your buck. And I personally think that and photovoltaics are what's really driving generation coming in close to where we are. 

And if you think about I'm getting more efficiency per unit power delivered, then my emissions are going down by that same proportion. So, on my list here, better use of energy sources, combined heat and power or cooling are really making it more efficient and proportionally, for the amount of energy you're using, you're lowering your emissions. But emissions really depends upon fuel, and this is something I don't really see much talked about in the literature. And I'm not a chemist, but I find this very interesting. We have methane and your energy is really in the hydrogen itself, so if you burn methane, you could have four units of hydrogen energy input out one carbon molecule. And then you see propane and ethane, etc. and you see, well let me go to the next slide. But here's where it really makes sense. Okay, here's the methane up here. I have methane in two units of a Bosch engine, and I get a CO2 molecule and I get two molecules of water. Now, if you look at this list, we start with hydrogen, I'm ignoring that as a fuel because it's not a fuel, you've got to make it from something else today, but you see methane has four hydrogens to one carbon and it has an energy density. 

And see the very interesting thing is ethanol has a much lower energy density. There was the amount of energy you could actually get from it. So they put more ethanol in your gas, they should be proportionally lowering the amount they want to charge you for the gasoline. But taking into account the number of hydrogen versus carbon, the energy density on the far right-hand side, methane is getting 1.2 moles per unit energy, but ethanol, which has one less hydrogen, puts out 30% more CO2. And notice it's the same as gasoline. And that has to do with energy density issues also. And coal is 60-some percent more because it has roughly one hydrogen per one carbon. So what this says to me is that if I can burn methane, I am really putting out a lot less carbon than if I'm burning coal or gasoline.  And Oak Ridge put this together in '08 which is the same CHP type of issue but now you're taking fuel. So at the top left-hand corner they took the average fuel mix of the utilities in the US, so there would be coal in that, there would be natural gas, there would be hydro, but the boiler they put methane into or natural gas. 

And then they looked at CHP which was natural gas only. So now you see the tons of carbon emissions is more than halved if you go to CHP and running off of natural gas. So, in a sense, local generation, that's using the waste heat and natural gas, you're getting much higher efficiency or more bang for your buck in energy and you're putting out a lot less carbon. This is a technology that's been around for 20 years. And so if I expand that, biogas, methane, or natural gas can really have your minimum carbon emissions. Now, let's look at wind and solar where I really mean PV panels. And that's a very interesting problem. Because it's what we call intermittent. A generator, if you need power, you run your generator and supply your power. You have PV panel on your house at night and you need power, you're out of luck. 

And so, in a sense, both solar and wind have their own track they run on and you can't predict it. The wind cannot be blowing or the wind can be blowing too much And so we call it an intermittent source. And this diagram on the lower left is 24 hours of wind at a location, I don't remember where it was, and each one is a different day. And you can see, let's see if I can, you see right here there's a blue line, that's the average of all of them. And the unfortunate thing about that average, your lower average power is during the day when you need it the most. But you can't say any particular day that's the case. So what you have to have, whether you have solar or wind, you have to have other generation to provide the energy when you need it or go without it. And so there needs to be some mixture, and this is where I'm going. If I'm using PV or wind, I probably want some CHP machines so I can harvest the waste heat efficiently and keep my carbon down to give me power when I need it on demand.  Now let me look at wind a little bit. 

You recognize this map, and these ovals are where the major wind areas are in the United States. They're coastal and in the Midwest. If you've ever been in South Dakota in the summertime, you know there's a lot of wind there. And so there's wind in this middle part also. And so there's issues of harvesting that wind. How much it's going to cost, how do you deal with the intermittency, and how do you get it to where it's needed. Now, this is on the east coast. This means New York independent system operator. And this goes back to '05. And you notice this is the month of July, August, and September, and the solid curves are the loads that the New York ISOCs. 

And if you look on the left-hand side, that's an enormous amount. That's like 25,000 million watts. And you see wind is down in the thousand megawatts. And the dotted curve shows the average wind for those three months. And you see at the noontime when the load is high, the wind is low. So there's usually this mismatch, at least on an average sense. So the utility is using a lot of wind, but they're also providing a lot of change to make up when the wind drops 450 megawatts, they're bringing out machines to provide that load. Or if it comes up, they have to back off machines. And that's what I'm trying to say in the bottom. You need to deal with the variability. 

Now, another important thing, oh, I forgot about this one. Denmark has been very aggressive, and they have a 30% wind in the country right now. But they have big neighbors, Germany and Sweden, which really help them out a lot. And if you look at these plots on the lower right-hand corner, you see the wind is the top plot. And this looks like this is over some 500 hours. And you see it fluctuating in megawatts from 300 megawatts up to 2,000 megawatts. But the bottom plot is all these connections to other countries of how they're providing the loss of power to them. And you're seeing a swing of between 1500 and something less than 500 coming in from the neighbors. So they were lucky. Their neighbors have a lot of robust generation, and they're providing the difference of it. 

Now, what does wind cost and why does it differ so much? So you see I have three columns here. I have 2.4 kilowatts. Houses are running probably around eight kilowatts. 100 kilowatts and 3,000 kilowatts. And the thing that's so striking, or really two things. One is the second line called capacity factor. A small one is somewhere on the average of getting only 20% of the available energy or its rating. When you go to the big ones, you get like 37. Have you ever noticed when you see these big wind towers, they're really big. And the reason for that is to catch wind that's more predictable. 

If you're down low like you will be with the lower ones, you get turbulence from buildings and trees, and you don't get near the effective wind. So there's really this sweet point. As you get up in the megawatts, you can afford these large towers, and look at the installed cost. A small one somewhere is $16,000, the 100 KW is like half a million, and these big utility systems are pushing eight million. But look at the bottom line, the number of years it takes to pay that back. Which means my capital cost, the amount of wind I can harvest versus how much I'm having to pay for my electricity. Small ones a hundred plus years, and the utilities are like 16 years. That's because the scale is really helping, driving cost the down. And so you really see wind making sense today at the utility level in the multi-megawatts. And at this point, I think that's where wind probably belongs unless you want to just have wind for the fun of it, but you're not doing it for any economic reason. 

 Now, here's a wonderful curve on photovoltaics. And those wind numbers also had incentives built into them.  But the one thing that that wind had, they only had to pick one particular place in the country and use that electrical price. This one is taking the local electric price, let's say in the Madison area, looking at how much sun is available on the average, and figuring out what's the local thing. And they're assuming $7 a watt which is high today. But making that assumption but you're getting incentives, Madison PV has a payoff on this chart somewhere in the 20 to 30 years. Look up in Minnesota. It's pushing 50-60 years. And that's basically because the power is low and the available sun is, I mean the power doesn't cost much money and the sun isn't very available. But then look at southern California where you see a five-year payback. 

That means utility rates have to be high and the sun has to be available. And so taking into account the local issues versus the sun, we have this range from less five years up to more than 60 years. And that really folds into whether it makes economic sense to put PV in the world. Now, the cost, you see the $7 line and that was, I forget the date, it was back in '08 or something like that. Here is where the trends are going, and Wisconsin hopes or plans in 2014 to get down to a little under $3. And so that's going to kind of halve what it would cost us here in Wisconsin, or make our payback closer to 10 years instead of 20 years.  And you look at this now, the data I was showing you on the chart was all the 100 KW one. So that's the one in the middle. But in general, PV cells have gone under a dollar a watt, which was the objective. So all this extra cost is the wiring, the labor, the power electronics, the protection. 

And you see the installed cost, and then the simple payback, at least for the 100 KW where we have data, is somewhere around 10 years. That's starting to make sense. We're starting to be practical. Now, if you go to Minnesota, I don't think it makes sense at all for a long while. So it's very regional.  Now, NREL, which is the National Renewable Energy Lab which is in Colorado, sat down and said, okay, if we take an objective that we want 20% renewables, remember the Danish had 30%, they sat down and figured out how many more transmission lines that we have to put in. And those inter-regions, and you see this dark green area, you got to put in 400 gigawatt miles of transmission just in that region. And then these big lines are ones you got to go from region to region. You see there's a lot of solar down there, there's wind in other places, as you harvest them all, this is their projection. Now the question is, is the public going to accept this? And there's a good chance they're not. 

And this is taking the assumption how do I do my optimal harvesting of these two energies. And I contend the practical solution is to make it more local. You head out to Iowa and you see all the wind turbines out there, they're local, they can provide stuff to us and help out with the loading. But do we want to take an enormous amount and put them in South Dakota and then build transmission lines to get them over to Milwaukee or Minneapolis. That's sort of the public debate that's going on here. And so I contend let's keep it local as possible because I think the chance of building these transmission lines are really minimal. Or at least it will take such a long time it may be irrelevant by the time it gets done.  Okay, so you see what I've put down the next one. I've done two things. I'm really saying we'll do solar or photovoltaics, we'll put those near the loads, but we'll use local energy resources, like a CHP machine, to deal with the intermittency. 

So we sort of have this local thing even in this building that doesn't have intermittency. It could even give some value to the utility, and it could guarantee fixed dispatch, if the utility thought that made any sense. But the last one is where microgrids started, how do you make this system more reliable? How do you use the machines that would be put in this building?  And so let me go back to another diagram or symbolic diagram of the utility. And the top of it is the power plant. It's in hundreds of megawatts. And there's high voltage transmission, then you step it down. And then off to the right, type of things, the lines can get congested at the high power level. A generator can break down or it can be down for maintenance. All those type of things limit reliability. But when we get down to here, we're worrying about lightening or a limb falling across a line or a squirrel getting into a thing and chewing through something and causing a line to trip off. 

So it's these type of things, like Sandy in New York it was storms just taking out these systems. And what I'm saying is we can improve our local reliability by using these small energy resources that we call distributed energy resources. The example of this building. If MG&E goes out, this building has some generation in it, it stays online. And that really can change the whole reliability picture. Now, if you start doing this, California recently worked out its 30-year plan, and if you look at their objectives and you say, oh, we're talking about 100 KW machines, they're talking about 12 million of them. Now, how are you going to handle it? Are you going to have an operator deciding which one of these 12 million is going to work where? I don't think so. Where if you're trying to do that, it'd make me nervous. [LAUGHTER] And so the complexity of it, one of the concepts of the microgrid is to take this distributed energy resource that are sitting right here and make them work as one unit. And we call it a microgrid. 

And if the distribution controller wants to do it, they can tell us how you would like to operate this microgrid. So it becomes a dispatchable resource and we don't care what it's made up of. Now, obviously there needs to be some economic incentives to do things and stuff like that. But to the big picture, it's a predictable, well behaved piece of energy resource. And you could say, well, back off your load or give me more power or give me more reactive power, which is a technical word that I don't need to go into, but microgrids can be very flexible, very diverse in what's in them, and they can be controlled and dispatched. Now, here's an example of two microgrids in the same system. And you see this blue part is one microgrid, and that blue box means a switch. So if something happens to the transmission system, let's say at the distribution substation, that switch can open and this blue microgrid can run by itself and the customers in the building or shopping mall or whatever doesn't see any difference. And then there could this pinkish one could be another microgrid. And so if we have problem with  utility, then the distribution system could start breaking down into very different microgrids. 

Those customers all have reliable power and then you have reconstruction of microgrids as you put the thing back together. And we call this clusters of microgrids or networks of microgrids or coupled microgrids. There's a whole bunch of stuff going. >> The microgrid concept still depends on large-scale baseline availability. >> Not sure what you mean by large-scale. >> Well, you've got central power plants on your diagram. >> Sure. It's working with the utility. In other words, we have a utility here, we're connected to the utility most of the time, but we're using our own PV and we're generating our local power CHP. Now, some places you're offloading congestion of the utility, other places you're taking funds away from them because you can generate cheaper than they can sell to you. 

So there's all kind of interesting things, but the concept of the microgrid is not be by yourself, but be part of the utility. And the ideal thing is that it can be a positive resource to the utility rather than telling the utility to buzz off. And there's that mentality and that's one thing we really have to think a lot about. But the normal operating mode is part of the utility, but if I didn't have this generation in here and a limb fell across the line, I'm out of power. Utility doesn't know about it unless I call them up and say we're out, and then they got to go out and find where the problem is. In this case, it happens the building will just automatically -- itself, provide you power. When the utility gets itself back together, you reconnect to it. Was that of any help? I think that was a very good question.  So the last part is we really cluster DER with loads to create microgrids. That gives you a lot more reliability. 

And if you have lots of machines in your microgrid, you start getting some redundancy. You can have one down and still power the building rather than one big source of generation. There's all kinds of nuances in that, and I'll actually show you some real work we've done on that. Now, let's go back to the cost picture. The main thing that's been added here is this natural gas CHP which comes from Oak Ridge a few years back.  But this has a two- to four-year payback, depending upon how costly your electricity is. New York City, the payback is around three years. So you're motivated to put these in. And the PV in this level of 100 KW is, in Wisconsin, maybe you'll get to 10 or maybe it's more than that. Those two make some sense. 

Microturbines get more costly just because they're not many of them made. Fuel cells are well over 45 years. And storage, I don't have the foggiest idea. Everywhere I see, like in the New York Times talking about PV, they say there's storage there. But we did a job at a jail which I'll show you some of. It had storage, and that storage was 80% of the cost of the whole job.  Right now you can't find numbers on payback years because how do you put value in storage. You could say, well, I have extra PV and at night it gives me power. Or I could offload the grid and keep it from congesting lines so that it doesn't have to build more stuff, but we haven't settled down with what makes sense for storage. So most utility applications of storage today are demo projects that are highly financed by DOE. 

But they're showing they can work. But I right now don't think if you're dealing with the economics and the pocketbook, our assumption is you won't put storage in. And we've done a lot of research in how these things work without storage.  So this is just a summary of the things I've been saying. We get more reliable by building microgrids. We are able to harvest the waste heat, and therefore make the energy, utilizing the energy much better. We get carbon down by using, basically, methane-based fuels. We can harvest our solar energy, and we have short payback periods. That works today and people are building them today. The activity on the east coast in both Connecticut and Manhattan is immense in building microgrids to provide this kind of power. 

 But now here's the catch. I promise you that there's no silver bullet. And so if I want to use CHP, I get much more efficient. But I have a generator in this building; do I want that? We make that very comfortable having them way out in the country. We never see them. We never worry about the emissions of them and don't worry about the noise. So if you want to be more efficient in using energy you put it in this building, but you got to make sure you can live with that. Including safety issues or noise issues or whatever. And then there's this whole issue of large scale versus local solutions. Utilities work because they're in a large scale. 

There's a financial structure. Investors are willing to put money into building this multi-megawatt natural gas generator because they know they get a safe return on their investment. If I go to a bank and say I want to put two of these things in this building and do a microgrid, I'm probably going to have a much tougher time. We just, in very small local solutions, there just isn't the financial infrastructure that utilities have at their scale and developed over a hundred years. So I don't, it's going to be tougher to do. And then, of course, with natural gas there's fracking. Just like nuclear doesn't put out any carbon but do you want nuclear? And so the question is, here I can certainly lower my carbon by doing natural gas and it's the low price fuel right now, but I had better get fracking to be a little bit more friendly to the environment or it's just going to kill the whole thing. And I think there's ways of doing it, but that conversation has to start happening. Natural gas makes sense. Are we willing to put up with it or what kind of constraints do we want to put on getting this stuff out of the system? A lot of stuff you read just doesn't make sense right now. 

So that's another one of the tradeoffs. And then you say, well let's go biogas. Let's do biodigesters and use waste fuel or the waste from farms or from buildings. It turns out that that's going to be a good deal more costly than natural gas right now, so do you want to be very green and pay an extra premium to not use natural gas? So there's all kinds of things just stressing against you on all of these. The other thing is I read a report on biogas that said  the amount of fuel it looks like we can get from biomass and converting into methane is less than 1% of what we can get out of photovoltaics. Which means if you expand photovoltaics enough, you have to cut down everything to get enough biogas out of it. So it becomes a niche market even if we get it cost-effective, but it's not the end all.  Now, solar energy. The first one is if you want all solar, then you've got to accept the fact that I won't have power sometimes or all renewables. The simple one is if I don't have a battery in this building and I'm running it off of solar at night, I don't have very much light. 

So, 100% renewable is sort of saying I've got to give up reliability. I've got to give up that power when I turn on my switch because it may not be available at that point. So there's again a tradeoff, and I'm proposing tradeoffs with natural gas machines against solar. So you can have both but neither is perfect. And then the intermittency, do you want to solve that problem locally or do you want to solve that problem regionally? All those transmission lines in the sense the I was showing in North America that -- put out is trying to deal with that intermittency. We have wind and we have generation elsewhere, so you've got to move a lot of power around. Or do you put that in this building which is a local solution? This is the one that's getting so current right now which disturbs me a lot. Probably a lot of us in this room could afford to put solar on our house and cut down our electrical bill. But if we keep doing that and doing that, that means we're giving less revenue to the utility. How are the investors getting their investment back? They paid for this gas generator and they're getting a return every month if less and less people are paying for it. 

So that means the rate base is going to go up for the people that can't afford it, and we really have a social issue. We actually have an issue that says can utility survive with a viable business plan. But we need to start a conversation on that. There's stuff out there that's saying I can put solar on but unless I want to be completely isolated from the grid, I'm going to have to pay something to be connected to that grid and it needs to be fair to everybody. To the utility, to the people that own their local generation, and to the people that can't afford to put their own generation in.  So, here with the utility again and if I look way down the road, maybe it's going to look like this, a network of microgrids. Notice the wind I've still stuck up on the high voltage side. So, hopefully, if we can work out the policy systems and the economics and the fairness issues, we can optimize local microgrids, optimize the harvesting of energy, the use of waste heat, but still have some backbone from the utility. But this is a whole new paradigm. It's just starting to be talked about today. 

But if I was going to guess, I would say we're going this way. The meeting I had to go to when I couldn't come here was the first conversation of this, the national labs and I, last week, we were talking to say, okay, when we get this network of microgrids how do we dispatch them? How do we use them? How do we bring value to the whole city's power system? By having these resources that give us more flexibility. That's just starting in Oak Ridge and Pacific National Lab and Sandia are all part of starting to think about that problem technically.  Oops. Let me take a few minutes to talk about what we've been doing here because I've been doing this for 10 years, actually maybe 12 years, and I've watched this thing get bigger and bigger, and now it's just snowballing and it's getting frightening. But I've been involved with what I call demo sites, I'll show you a little bit about this Santa Rita Jail in California or this co-op that was in Manhattan that survived Sandy that has a CERTS microgrid. I haven't told you what CERTS is. CERTS is basically a consortium of natural labs and PSERC, which is a consortium of universities that sort of pick projects and use university and lab people to work on this. And one of the projects that's been going on since CERTS started is distributed energy resources. Anyway, there's the jail, there's this CERTS test facility at American Electric Power which has been doing tests and proof of principle for a good 10 years, and the Sacramento Mutual Utility District right now is commissioning a microgrid. 

And then the research activities here, almost all this work has been prototyped in hardware over in the electrical engineering building, an organization called WEMPEC, which is Wisconsin Electric Machine and Power Electronics Consortium. We built this new building called the WE building which is bringing together different things. There is a very high bay in there that's going to be dedicated to testing and doing microgrid research. And then there's a Wisconsin Energy Resource Consortium which is getting off the ground. That's Madison, Milwaukee, Milwaukee School of Engineering in Marquette and the local MATC there, which I don't remember their name, and there's about 14 companies. Their first project is going to be microgrid projects. And so the activity is immense. So here's the jail at Santa Rita. And this is the largest scale in the, it's sort of the most satisfying project I've been involved with. In the lower left here, you see an aerial view of this jail which holds 4,000 inmates. 

And all those black things on the roof are PV. In fact, they're about 1.6 megawatts of photovoltaic. But also on the site, in the upper left-hand corner, is this one-megawatt fuel cell. That's run off of natural gas, and they harvest the waste heat on a 24/7 basis. The rest of it is an enormous battery. This battery is four-megawatt hours. In the lower right-hand corner are lithium ion batteries. There's 8,000 of those in four trailers. And in the middle top, you see the power electronics equipment that was made here in Franklin, Wisconsin, by S&C. And here's sort of schematic of it. 

The key thing about this microgrid, right here is a switch. A switch that opens in about 20 milliseconds. So if something goes wrong with the utility out here, this switch opens up, the battery instantaneously makes up for the lost energy from the utility, and the fuel cell and the wind turbines and the PV just keep putting out whatever they can put out. Then there's two megawatt generators. If the utility is down too long and the battery is starting to become discharged, those generators come on to charge up the battery and keep it running in the long term. They're diesel. Diesel is not very nice to the environment, so they're very limited at how long they could run. But if this is an emergency and you lose you power and you lose all your inmates, you're going to run that diesel for a while. [LAUGHTER] But the hope is you don't have to. Okay? [LAUGHTER] There's a rule that I think in California it's 400 hours in non-critical places a year that you can run diesel. 

There's real restrictions on the diesels. Now, here's another pride and joy: Sandy. This is company called Tecogen and these are 100 KW and they basically use our microgrid concepts. And these things are plug and play. So this is in a building. It's hooked up for using the waste heat and providing electric power. When Sandy happened and took down Manhattan, this building stayed alive, and it provided heat and it provided electricity and the elevators ran and there were 700 people living there and they suddenly got 1400 people. [LAUGHTER] I think every friend and every relative showed up because this was down for four days. The condo next door is now putting this system in. Okay? And this was 20 stories. 

I'm just amazed at how smart this condo was to do to CHP and be able to run things and use this as emergency backup. Now, this is the test site that's been going on, you see, since 2001. And that's the California Energy Commission, what CEC means.  They invested $6 million in this to build this facility, to show these concepts I was talking about. I haven't talked a lot about the details, but this is a Tecogen pre-competitive, and after this testing, they decided to go commercial. That's a V8 Chevy engine. You can buy that for a hundred bucks, run it in natural gas, run it variable speed to be high efficiency at partial loads, and then run it through power electronics to interface to the grid. And there's a bunch of things we proved here without any storage in the system and no communications. And the very lower part is a public site that you can download hundreds of documents on this. It CERTS at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. 

Or if you just Google CERTS, you will find it popping up. And you can drown in this, just thousands of pages. But this is where we've tested everything. We are still doing that now. We are now trying to put direct connected synchronous machines rather than inverter based ones. We're looking at PV tied in with it. We're looking at storage tied in so we can get expertise that mix and match the whole variety of distributed energy resources. So for particular applications, you can figure out what I get my most bang for my buck to meet my current needs. This is at SMUD, which is the Sacramento Mutual Utility District. They have much more flexibility than vested owned utilities, and they're being very assertive. 

But what they've done here is this is a building that's very interesting. Here is basically their backup control center, which needs power 24/7, they can't go offline, and over here is a utility building that needs hot water and cold water and air conditioning. So we have three Tecogens in here, so that's 300 KW. Here's the ilo switch, and we're going to collect data on how is the UPS for one year, how efficient it is for using the waste heat in electricity. Is it really 70% efficient or 80% efficient for a whole year, 24/7? I doubt it. But to get real numbers in showing, hey, here is what it really looked like at this environment. And it's been funded by SMUD, California Energy Commission, and DOE. And after this, we plan to put some storage and PV, and there's a little bit of PV but it's so small it makes no difference. And then this is the new WE building. Which I think everybody probably has seen. 

If you haven't gone into it, you ought to go into it. And these are the people involved in it. PSERC and WEMPEC are the two I know, and then the Engine Research Center which is trying to improve emissions and efficiency of traditional engines. There starts to become a neat synergy between these engineering groups and then these bioengineering groups and the Nelson Institute. We're trying to bring all people working in different parts of energy together. And I hope we all start talking to each other and we start leveraging and really making some progress. And that's it. I thank you. [APPLAUSE]