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Forefront Magazine - Fall 2007 |
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GET SMART: |
| We were lucky this past summer. There were some scorchers, but nothing like the heat wave of 2006, in which 110-plus-degree temperatures in some Bay Area cities lasted four consecutive days, leaving 57,000 residents without power. As summer temperatures rise and more air conditioners power on, the risk of outages and brownouts increases. Utility bills spike. Even worse, we push the limits of existing power plants and build new ones, all the while spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “Wouldn’t it be great if your meter could receive information about when the price is lowest to run your appliances and air conditioning?” asks mechanical engineering professor Paul Wright, acting director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). To increase home energy efficiency and cut the cost of keeping cool,Wright and colleagues are bringing electronic brains into our home’s electrical systems, the next generation of “smart” meters and thermostats. The approach, known as demand–response technology, uses the smart dust sensors originally developed at Berkeley by Kris Pister and colleagues Dick White, David Culler and Jan Rabaey, all from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Today, these devices are about the size of three 25-cent coins and contain a small computer, radio and sensors. In this application, the sensors are used to monitor temperatures in various rooms of your home or apartment and relay data to a networked thermostat. Sensors coupled to electrical circuits in breaker boxes monitor power consumed by other appliances and indicate the cost of running, say, the washing machine at 2 p.m. on a sweltering day, when energy is most expensive. As energy prices shift, they are transmitted wirelessly from the utility company to the home’s smart meter. The resident will simply program temperature preferences on a user-friendly thermostat. Employing control algorithms, the system then sets the air conditioner to match the desired profile as temperatures shift throughout the day. During the summers of 2006 and 2007, engineering students led by Professor David Auslander and postdoc researcher Nathan Ota teamed with Professor Ed Arens and students in the Department of Architecture to test the technology in a handful of Bay Area homes. Collaborating with the California Energy Commission (CEC), the Public Utilities Commission and the state’s largest utility companies, the students demonstrated that you can save energy without making people uncomfortable. Now the Berkeley researchers are collaborating with industry to reduce the size and cost of the sensors, which currently run on replaceable batteries. Graduate student Lindsay Miller is working on an “energy scavenging” approach that would convert ambient vibration of structural components like air-conditioning ducts into electricity. Policy and pricing will play as critical a role as technology. The CEC’s goal is to equip every California home with new meters within 10 years, and the researchers hope their technology will be inside those devices. According to an Electric Power Research Institute report, the technology could eliminate the state’s need for five to ten new power plants over the next decade. “We won’t need to produce as much electricity, because we’ll be using it more sensibly,”Wright says. |
