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For a large organization, cutting the electric bill isn't necessarily as simple as using less electricity. In fact, avoiding one brief spike in demand can save far more money than reducing overall consumption.
Alex Brodsky, a professor in the George Mason University Department of Computer Science, and his research team developed technology that can help organizations make complex decisions about how to manage energy resources and evaluate potential investments.
A $50,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant through its Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program is helping Brodsky explore how to move that technology from research to market. I-Corps teaches researchers to evaluate the commercial potential of technologies developed through academic research. Participants identify possible markets and customers and conduct at least 100 interviews with those potential customers.
“The interviews are instrumental,” Brodsky said. “Some of your hypotheses turn out to be false, while other things you hadn't considered turn out to be true.”
Much of this I-Corps work is being led by Xu (Ethan) Han, a former PhD student of Brodsky's who is now a faculty member in George Mason's Department of Computer Science. Han serves as an entrepreneurial lead for the project, called Microgrid Optima.
Microgrids coordinate multiple energy resources within a local energy system. They can integrate electricity from the power grid with on-site generation, energy storage, building systems, and other energy resources.
Microgrid Optima helps determine how those resources should work together. Instead of relying primarily on preset operating schedules, the system can recommend what individual components should do at intervals throughout the day. It can also help organizations decide which new energy resources make financial sense before making potentially expensive investments. Many commercial and industrial customers’ electric bills are determined not by just how much electricity they use, but also by what their peak demand is; a short period of unusually high demand can significantly affect future bills.
An organization might thus choose to use a battery during a demand spike and recharge it later. “Energy storage by itself doesn't save the total amount of energy you use,” Brodsky said, but this strategy may reduce peak usage enough to produce substantial savings. As a result, investing in an expensive battery can sometimes quickly pay for itself.
The challenge is figuring out when such an investment makes sense and how it interacts with everything else in the system. “Thinking of how you invest in each component in isolation is a bad approach, because the components have a very strong operational interaction,” he said.
The team is exploring a range of potential markets for the technology, with the I-Corps interviews helping identify which types of organizations and energy environments present the strongest opportunities. One seemingly obvious market, data centers, is less promising because their operators place a much higher priority on securing enough electrical capacity than on reducing costs.
Microgrid Optima draws on decision-guidance technology Brodsky's research group developed over many years and applied to problems ranging from energy and autonomous vehicles to pandemic response. During the COVID pandemic, Brodsky worked with George Mason epidemiologist Amira Roess in the College of Public Health to develop a system for evaluating combinations of testing, contact tracing, symptom reporting, and other mitigation measures. The university adopted many of the team's recommendations.
The I-Corps program could be an early step toward bringing the latest application of that technology to customers. After the team's interviews help identify its most promising market, Brodsky said, other federal programs, including Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer funding, could provide routes toward commercialization.