Science in the Triangle

Energy woes are pervasive in the news and loom heavy in people’s minds these days. Even though grass-root supports exists for alternative energy development throughout the nation, significant and vast change is slow to gain inertia. So it was with interest and an open mind that I attended a lecture last Tuesday at Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park where Alex Huang, director of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management Systems (FREEDM Systems), discussed what his group was working on to mitigate what he called “the looming energy crisis.”

According to Huang, who is an electrical and computer engineering professor at N.C. State University, the U.S. ranks low on the global spectrum of developed nations that source renewable energy. We’re also overly-reliant on fossil fuels, and we tend to import these fuels from politically unstable regions of the world. Not much new there… but Huang’s FREEDM Systems center is thinking up ways to counter these factors.

The FREEDM Systems center is a consortium of collaborating universities, utilities and businesses. By spanning from think-tank groups at universities to market-savvy businesses, he says they offer “transformational research” with a focus on moving innovational research into the marketplace. In addition to working with businesses to develop suitable business models, the center also analyzes international energy markets and energy forecasts.

Revamping the nation’s electric grid tops Huang’s list of must-do items. In his vision, the new grid is analogous to the internet… it’s an “energy internet” actually. A major innovation of the internet is that it allowed people to share information more easily by making data more freely accessible and by allowing people to upload and download at will. Substitute “information” in that sentence for “electron” and you might see where he’s going with this analogy.

“In the energy world, we need to learn to share the electron,” Huang says. Big utilities would need to move from an ownership model to a user-sharing model — not a simple adaptation to make, but one that he says is more oriented to the services demanded by customers. A revamped grid would draw energy from largely renewable and de-centralized sources and then distribute it in a new framework that is akin to distributed computing versus a central mainframe. By creating small islands of homes or businesses connected to energy routers with shut-off software controls, major blackouts would become a thing of the past, Huang says.

Devising energy islands for homes would mean that small groups of residences are linked to decentralized, software-controlled router units connected to a main distribution system (supported in turn by the decentralized, renewable sources). The grid software would monitor and control a bi-directional energy flow. This controlled flow would allow people to “upload” energy from their own personal storage devices if they, say, had solar panels or a wind turbine that generated extra current, and get energy credits. But changing to a controllable bi-directional flow system would require a massive switch from the transformers we know today to a new “solid state transformer” — and Huang says we don’t even have the components to build it today. (Bummer. On a personal note, this is where my excitement deflated.)

“This solid state transformer would be made from different materials and require different physics than a normal transformer to make it work,” Huang says. It’s also an example of something the FREEDM center is banding together in an interdisciplinary fashion to try to create, starting with research into silicon carbide semiconductor chips.

So… if they can build the futuristic solid state transformer how might this vision for a greener tomorrow come to fruition? Huang says he sees disruptive business models as the key. Just as Google, YouTube and EBay sent disruptive waves through the media industries, he sees innovative businesses as the solution to bringing a new electrical grid to customers. For more details about the FREEDM Systems center, its researchers, collaborators, industry partners and burgeoning ideas, please visit: http://www.freedm.ncsu.edu/