Bits & Watts is a major new Stanford University initiative focused on innovations for the 21st century electric grid—a new grid paradigm that is needed to incorporate large amounts of clean power and a growing number of distributed energy resources, while simultaneously enabling grid reliability, resilience, security and affordability.
The initiative organizes its research into three thematic areas: grid core, grid edge and grid data science. The initiative will advance technologies, policies, markets, regulations and business models that work in concert between each thematic area.
The Bits & Watts Initiative seeks to: Offer and implement new research ideas and de-risk them for the electricity ecosystem; Educate faculty, students, post-doctoral fellows and staff about the holistic systems-focused approach to solving problems for the electricity ecosystem; Offer holistic educational experience for current industry executives and other leaders; Create open-source hardware and software solutions rapidly adopted by industry and policymakers; Maintain flexibility amid uncertainty to exploit emerging technologies; Be a trusted and unbiased convener; and Create platforms and protocols for sharing data with due consideration of privacy, security and confidentiality.
Grid Core initiatives will focus on coordination and integration of transmission and distribution systems. The future electric grid will require significant coordination between the transmission and distribution networks’ planning and operation. The increasing penetration of distributed solar photovoltaic systems increases the intermittency of withdrawals and the likelihood of two-way flows in the distribution network. The growing stringency of utility-level renewable portfolio standards increases the intermittency of injections to the transmission network. These are the two major drivers of the potential economic and reliability benefits from greater coordination.
Realizing these potential benefits will require wholesale and retail market design changes that create business models to support the installation of: Real-time monitoring and control devices in the distribution network; Grid-scale and distributed energy storage devices; and Automated load-control technologies at the customer level
More efficient retail pricing plans can support investments in distributed storage and automated load-control technologies. New wholesale market products can provide the necessary compensation to base-load and fast-ramping generation technologies essential to maintain system balance for intermittent generation resources at both ends of the grid. Networked monitoring and control devices in the distribution system combined with control devices and algorithms to optimize system performance and cost can allow distributed generation and load-control resources to be aggregated. This will provide both energy and operating reserves to the wholesale market in an automated manner.
Bits & Watts research will design pricing mechanisms and market approaches to elicit economically efficient engagement of consumers and energy resources enabled by the proposed architecture and technologies. Researchers will investigate a variety of required new services and develop hardware that will offer low cost options for grid flexibility. This research thrust will explore changes to regulatory policy and governance to smoothly integrate and reward superior new technologies and practices.
Grid Edge will focus on integrating the grid and the empowered consumer. New consumer expectations, policies supporting customer control and enabling technologies are recasting the relationship between consumers and the electricity grid. Residential, commercial and industrial consumers increasingly generate and store electricity, monitor and control their energy use, and respond to grid conditions. The flexibility in these distributed resources, once widely deployed and networked, can help integrate a high penetration of intermittent solar and wind power.
But making the most of these resources is a big challenge for utilities and regulators. New technologies, policies, markets, regulations and business models must incentivize and optimize these edge-of-the grid resources, which include building-level assets and those deployed on the last mile of the distribution system by utilities, entrepreneurs and others.
Analyzing the emerging wealth of data being generated and designing innovative solutions that leverage emerging technology trends will also help make the most of these distributed resources. Bits & Watts’ experiments will advance behavioral and economic models of consumers to unprecedented accuracy and scale. Work in this area on distributed information technology, sensors and automatically controlled demand will enable consumers to aggregate their networked resources to participate in electricity markets.
Bits & Watts’ research on the grid edge will help policymakers decipher large amounts of heterogeneous data and take advantage of technological opportunities. It will also assist electricity service providers and related entrepreneurs to reduce the risks of innovation and develop profitable business models.
Grid Data Science: While finance, marketing and other industries rapidly exploit advances in data science and in other information and communication technologies, the power sector has been relatively slow to do so. This is partly due to a lack of publicly available data, concerns about privacy and, until recently, the absence of infrastructure to capture electricity data and analyze it accurately.
Now is the time to apply data science and advanced information technologies to the electric power ecosystem. Electricity data is growing rapidly. Information sources include hundreds of millions of smart meters, rooftop solar modules, electric vehicles and smart thermostats. Publicly available data sources like weather forecasts, energy markets and maps also supply energy-relevant information. Mining these vast for insights could dramatically improve the operation and planning of the grid.
Accessing the data is a challenge, because the owners are reluctant to share data sets and sometimes not allowed to do so, but the electricity industry recognizes these data sets as enormously more useful in combination. Bits & Watts research in the data science area will develop robust protocols for data sharing that respect private enterprise and consumer privacy. Access to these aggregated data sets will allow researchers and software engineers to create high impact algorithms and tools for the grid, leading to new energy services that can be offered to the consumer and among entities on both sides of the meter.
Challenges to analyzing the data include assimilating the extremely heterogeneous sources and building the required systems—including cloud-based processing and storage—to handle the vast quantity of information. Bits & Watts has begun assembling the necessary expertise at Stanford and among industry allies to overcome these key barriers to unlocking the power of data for the electric power system.
