US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $13.5m to the non-profit Center for the Commercialization of Electric Technologies (CCET) for a series of energy projects that will include investments in the Land Tejas community of Discovery at Spring Trails.
The community is a model test case for the development of future distributed energy-generation projects and the use of green technologies in residential community design and construction.
The DOE grant will be matched with an investment of $13.9m from the project’s participants, including Land Tejas, Direct Energy, GE, whose ecomagination initiative inspired the project, Masco and participating CCET members, for a total investment of $27.4m. In addition, Houston-based En-Touch Systems is providing fiber-to-the-home technology to the project.
The CCET grant will be used to enhance the use of Synchrophasor measurement to monitor conditions on the Texas power transmission backbone, to improve direct load control, which is made possible by advanced meter information collected by the state’s transmission and distribution utilities, and develop the infrastructure of Discovery at Spring Trails, Houston’s first solar-powered hybrid community, and integrate the community with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) wind energy system as a Smart Grid demonstration project.
The origin of the project is the Energy Independence and Security Act, which was passed by congress to authorize Smart Grid demonstration projects, and funding comes from the federal government’s $787bn economic stimulus package, also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), which was signed into law on February 17, 2009.
The DOE grant, which will be invested during a five-year demonstration period from January 2010 to January 2015, will be a part of the effort to better integrate the Texas wind energy resources into the state’s electric transmission, distribution and metering system.
The project includes the installation of synchrophasors to enhance monitoring of grid conditions as variable wind resources move through the system and the transmission of power from the grid to integrated Smart Grid technologies at Discover at Spring Trails.
These will include household and solar plant battery storage, which will be charged during off-peak hours to assure the lowest-possible energy costs, as well as smart meters, appliances, lighting and controls furnished through the GE ecomagination initiative, and plug-in stations for hybrid electric vehicles in every garage.
Other participating members of CCET involved in these projects include the Southwest Research Institute, Electric Power Group, CenterPoint Energy, Oncor, American Electric Power, Sharyland Utilities, GridPoint, Drummond Group, Frontier Associates, Valence, and Xtreme Power/Energy Xtreme.