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UNM and PNM Resources, Inc. have teamed up in their search for an efficient and low-price energy systems.
The two organizations announced last week that they would collaborate on the Cloud-based Energy Resource Scheduling (CERES) Initiative.
Mechanical engineering professor Andrea Mammoli and a team of three graduate students manage the initiative. The initiative aims to calculate how to use building resources to meet energy needs in the most effective way, without disrupting the grid too much, Mammoli said.
Mammoli said he has been working with PNM on different projects related to energy distribution for many years. He said that at the beginning of 2013, UNM started planning CERES and received a $250,000 grant from PNM, which is enough to fund the project for two years.
One possible solution is by optimizing power during off-peak times or by using different types of power at certain times, both of which building managers often fail to do, he said. Mammoli said that in New Mexico, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. is considered off-peak energy consumption times for corporate use, making energy costs about half the price.
“They don’t really manage things in an optimal way. So, this system that we are testing does that,” Mammoli said. “It allows you to optimize how you operate your system, and so the benefits are that it could give you the lowest cost for example, it could give you the lowest carbon emissions, or it could give you some combination of the two.”
From here, he wants all the buildings in a certain area to coordinate so they can avoid spiking their power grids, he said.
“What we’re trying to do is calculating how to use resources that they have so that they meet that need in the best possible way, without disrupting the grid,” he said.
Matthew Robinson, a graduate student involved with the project, said a common way for businesses to take advantage of off-peak prices is by using thermal storage. This involves chilling a large tank of water to use for cooling the building the next day, he said.
However, Robinson said many buildings overcharge for water consumption, and therefore waste money and energy.
“One of the facilities we’re looking at, when they overcharge it, you can see pretty significant losses to the environment,” Robinson said “So, if we can match that charge to what the model tells us, then we can try and save that, and save on those losses.”
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But this model will only work on facilities with distributed energy sources, Mammoli said. While they are not particularly common right now, he said, there is a growing trend toward them.
He said this model is becoming cheaper, offers more reliability and lessens the load on a power grid, which means less energy is used and the end user pays less money.
Mammoli said his team has been conducting their research on several buildings in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, including the One Sun Plaza Building, Hotel Andaluz, the Hyatt Regency and Santa Fe Community College. Their research is in conjunction with the optimization software that Lawrence Berkeley National Labs in Berkeley, Calif. have been working on for about 10 years.
Mammoli said he hopes that this type of energy system will become the norm for buildings around the world, a goal that ties in with his research ideals.
“I like to do research that is going to make an impact in a relatively short time in the real world,” he said “That’s my typical research portfolio, and this fits in because basically, this takes the outcome of research and actually deploys it to the real world. It establishes that final link.”
