UC San Diego Today
Summary
A dozen buildings on the University of California San Diego campus. All of the campus’ solar panels. All the chargers for electric vehicles. More than 2,400 light fixtures. More than 800 smart plugs.
These are some of the assets that DERConnect, a National Science Foundation-funded testbed for the powergrid, will be able to control on the UC San Diego campus. The team held a ribbon cutting ceremony at its brand new headquarters on the UC San Diego campus on July 11, 2024.
DERConnect’s goal–supported by a $42 million grant from the NSF–is to help industry and academic researchers better understand how to integrate ever more distributed energy sources such as solar panels, wind turbines, smart buildings and electric vehicle batteries into the power grid.
The DERConnect headquarters include batteries that can store power produced by solar panels to be used later on the grid–enough to power several campus buildings. One room is dedicated to servers and computers capable of simulating power grids for entire cities and entire states. One room is dedicated to small Raspberry Pi computers that control individual devices on the UC San Diego campus’ microgrid, such as electric vehicle charging stations, printers, TVs, smart plugs and more. Another room houses devices that act like giant breaker boxes to turn all these assets on and off.
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