| NSF Org: |
TI Translational Impacts |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 29, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 12, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1632124 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Jesus Soriano Molla
jsoriano@nsf.gov (703)292-7795 TI Translational Impacts TIP Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,000,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,000,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
341 PINE TREE RD ITHACA NY US 14850-2820 (607)255-5014 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
527 College Ave. Ithaca NY US 14853-3501 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | PFI-Partnrships for Innovation |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.084 |
ABSTRACT
Smart meters, which measure electricity use in near real-time, have been installed in more than 40% of homes in the United States, yet the promises of smaller electric bills, reduced electric generation capacity, greenhouse gas reductions, and a more energy-engaged society, have yet to materialize. This Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) project seeks to enable a next generation residential energy market that will reduce consumers' costs, increase the flexibility of the electric grid to integrate renewable energy of all types and sizes -- roof top solar to large scale wind farms -- while increasing the robustness of electricity delivery. This project will test whether adding rechargeable batteries (electric storage) to individual smart meters will turn these potential benefits into reality. This research leverages a new Energy Smart Community (ESC), comprised of 12,000 smart meters and a wireless data network in the Ithaca NY area deployed in response to New York State?s Reforming the Energy Vision strategy. The network of 12 thousand homes equipped with smart meters will become the test bed for this project. Researchers, working with the primary partners, will actively engage residential customers in the design of the smart service system and involve consumers in the testing and optimization of the virtual storage systems. A smart service system will control when the battery charges (purchases electricity from the grid) and when it discharges (avoiding purchasing electricity from the grid) allowing the thus far unrealized savings for consumers, while creating potential new business opportunities and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The resulting smart service system will be highly marketable and readily transferable to other communities and utilities throughout the United States and the world. This project is an integrated collaboration that is uncommon for universities. It engages a regulated utility, for-profit corporations, venture investors, residential community members and government agencies with a shared intent to bring solutions to the market at scale. This team will develop the smart service system infrastructure that will allow the retail energy market considered crucial to 21st century power distribution, to emerge.
A signature of this project is the use of computer models to simulate residential batteries, which may be either stand-alone or contained within an electric vehicle, allowing researchers to test situations where most residential homes have a battery without the cost or challenges of purchasing and installing them. A small number of homes will be outfitted with real batteries to ensure the computer models accurately capture how real batteries function. Five cross-disciplinary and cross-organizational tasks will leverage the team's skill sets: (1) Develop and test a unique experimental economics platform that will guide the design of market mechanisms that focus on customer-based distributed storage and generation capacity in electricity distribution systems, (2) Design, implement, and test a fully instrumented, control and communication capable, prototype smart service system at the individual residence level, (3) Develop virtual storage simulation modeling tools to integrate into the ESC advanced metering infrastructure (smart meters) to enable the efficient testing of different time-varying rate scenarios at low cost, (4) Design, implement, and analyze cross-disciplinary survey and focus group efforts to understand, engage, and collect feedback from the consumer, and (5) Carry out customer choice and consumer incentivization research.
The lead institution is Cornell University with its units the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Communications, Natural Resources, Applied Economics and Management, and Information Science (academic non-profit). Primary Partners are: AVANGRID, Inc. (New Haven CT, large business), BMW North America (Woodcliff Lake NJ, large business), SolarCity (San Mateo CA, large business) and Cornell Cooperative Extension -Tompkins County (Ithaca NY, non-profit). Distributed Sun (Washington DC, small business) is a broader-context partner.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Our overarching goal was to test the hypothesis that a smart service system comprised of smart control software operating a distributed network of smart meters coupled to behind-the-meter residential storage (batteries) would enable a dynamic retail energy market within our test bed, the 12,400 smart metered Energy Smart Community homes in Tompkins County, NY. The goal was to identify new revenue streams for utilities, a potential new business opportunity for aggregators, and economic, robustness, and environmental stewardship advantages for customers. We had five major objectives:
- Development of a unique experimental economics platform that is able to guide the design of market mechanisms that focuses on customer-based solar and battery storage systems.
- Design and implement a fully instrumented smart system at the individual residence level.
- Develop virtual energy storage that can test time-varying electricity rate scenarios.
- Design and implement a cross-disciplinary survey that looks at the before and after effects of smart meter installation in a community.
- Understand customer choice and consumer incentivization at the residential level.
In response to our objectives we developed a series of interdisciplinary tasks that led to project outcomes, each with broader impacts and built on a foundation of technical merit. These outcomes include:
Behavioral Economics Experiment: We develop an energy economic simulation tool that allows us to measure the behavior of residential consumers over 10 year simulation periods when presented with options for solar panels and residential storage interfaced to smart meters. By comparing various scenarios we conclude four principal findings: (1) There is a resistance to early adoption of both solar and batteries due to the presence of fixed electric rates, but ultimately the option increases the eventual market size of both, (2) Detailed bill information decreases adoption of batteries, even when batteries become cost effective, while solar adoption is increased, (3) Providing battery adoption rate information of the region increases adoption of both batteries and solar. This may be important because, unlike home solar, home batteries are not visible to the public. (4) Full information (bill and battery adoption information) initially discourages battery adoption, but, ultimately encourages adoption of both batteries and solar over longer time frames. Two additional conclusions are that as home batteries became less expensive, the saturation market share for batteries generally increased, and this, in turn, increased adoption of both batteries and solar. Second, providing information on the environmental impact of adopting home solar and a home battery reduced rates of adoption for both.
Designing smart homes to achieve consumers? goals: Smart homes promise to lower energy demand peaks through demand response by making residential electricity demand management easier. However, managing energy by itself is not sufficient to sell expensive smart home products to consumers. We developed a framework which maps consumer goals to available smart home products using functions each product performs. Consumers want a smart home for its convenience and security, then get energy management as a side effect. We demonstrate the use of this framework on our prototype smart home in Upstate New York.
Develop and Test Software to Implement Virtual Battery Concept: We developed the framework and implemented in software to simulate the virtual storage, that is the simulation of a physical behind-the-meter battery entirely in software, as envisioned in our patent on this idea. We used data from an Energy Smart Community home smart meter to make initial assessments of the value stream of a battery based on utility proposed time-of-use (TOU) rates.
OptimizEV ? An EV Charging Field Experiment: This pilot with the local utility and approved by the NY Publics Service Commission involved the participation of 35 residential customers that own plugin EVs in Tompkins County to assess the perceived and actual value of consumer EV charge pricing based on willingness to defer charging.
Survey Data to Study Social Vulnerability to Smart Grid Systems: Our results provide valuable baseline data to which actual resident experience may be compared. This was followed up by a second survey to assess how the smart meter rollout and implementation affected consumer attitudes to smart energy systems. Our results demonstrate that?in contrast to the hopes of smart energy advocates, social acceptance of the smart grid either remain steady or decline over time. Further analyses reveal that the factors that shape acceptance also change over time. This study makes two contributions: (1) social acceptance of the smart grid may not improve, but actually decline over time even with robust engagement of consumers; and (2) the trend in social acceptance of new energy technologies is not necessarily likely to increase after implementation.
Analyzing survey data regarding customer response to smart energy bundles: These customer choice experiments made it possible to estimate the marginal willingness to pay for energy bundle features, including willingness to delay charging of electric vehicles.
Last Modified: 01/29/2021
Modified by: Edwin A Cowen
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