The objective is to coordinate and control consumer loads and distributed energy resources (DERs) out to the absolute edge of the grid. SunTech Drive’s Pico family of universal variable speed motor controllers will be the end nodes driving each of the individual loads, upgrading installed systems to ‘smart’ loads.
Google Research Scientist Ana Radovanovic said: “I am glad that SunTech Drive joined Stanford University and Google in this DOE funded initiative to advance the state of the art in the area of distributed energy systems.
“The envisioned technology could revolutionize the IoT control in the domain of electric motors, by enabling a bi-directional, cloud-based communication and control for a wide variety of residential and industrial loads.”
SunTech’s products offer full Internet-of-Things and solar ready variable frequency drives that will work with any electric motor regardless of voltage, frequency or phase. These universal motor controllers also support multiple analog and digital sensors making every motor an intelligent distributed energy end node. These products are deployed around the globe in applications including livestock cooling, water pumping and oil and gas installations.
Stanford University associate professor Ram Rajagopal said: “We are very excited to be partnering with SunTech Drive to develop the higher level software architectures that will leverage their Pico controller architecture at the end node.”
The project will also involve developing mechanisms for electric utilities to interact with individual loads using metadata schemas for both demand reduction and diversion load control.
SunTech Drive CEO John LoPorto said: “We are very excited to be partnering with such notable partners on a project with vast implications for the future of the grid.”
Source: Company Press Release
