• Designing Food-Energy-Water Systems for Off-Grid Regions
    • Daniel Sambor (Stanford University | Visiting Researcher ACEP/INE)
    • September 07, 2018

Designing Food-Energy-Water Systems for Off-Grid Regions: An Optimization Tool for Incorporating Demand Flexibility into High Penetration Renewable Microgrids

Reducing diesel consumption in remote Alaskan villages and substituting with locally-harvested renewable energy is a potential solution to providing affordable energy independence. In order to increase renewable energy penetrations while maintaining grid reliability in islanded microgrids, energy storage becomes critical. However, electrochemical storage, like lithium-ion battery technology, is still expensive and challenging to install in remote areas, resulting in grid reliability issues in some high-penetration renewable grids without proper storage or demand management.

This seminar will highlight preliminary results and outline a PhD research proposal that will optimize capacity and dispatch of thermal energy storage and demand response through food-energy-water dispatchable loads, in order to ameliorate grid reliability concerns in high-penetration renewable islanded grids. These dispatchable loads, including modular greenhouses and water treatment infrastructure, can be controlled to closely follow renewable generation, all while simultaneously addressing food, energy and water security. Currently no available microgrid modeling tool exists which can optimize dispatchable load capacity and scheduling around generation, and dispatch excess renewable energy to thermal energy storage.

This research is being performed as part of the NSF project MicroFEWs: Coupling infrastructure improvements to food-energy-water system dynamics in small cold region communities, in order to develop an interdisciplinary planning process to integrate food-energy-water infrastructure in coordination with partner Alaskan communities.

Daniel Sambor is a PhD student in the Atmosphere & Energy program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he also received his Master of Science degree. Sambor previously was an undergraduate at Brown University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering.


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Meeting ID: 366 183 727


 

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