While completing my MSEE degree, I got an idea for how to design sustainable energy generation systems. To give some background, the electric power system delivers electricity to homes and buildings to power televisions, refrigerators, computers, and every other device that plugs into an outlet. A sustainable energy generation system is an off-grid (stand-alone) electric power system that can independently provide reliable electric power to a home/building from renewable energy resources. The main challenge in designing sustainable energy generation systems, i.e. solar and battery storage, is determining how much solar and how much storage are required to reliably supply power year-round.
By considering oversized PV, I pioneered an algorithm that approximates the energy storage requirements for increasingly oversized PV. The result was a graph of all possible configurations of oversized PV and storage, and I found an inverse relationship between PV and storage. Here is an animation of what this looks like.
This relationship is important to optimize for the cheapest system. Since PV and energy storage have different costs, the algorithm computes the price for each system and determines the most cost-effective configuration shown by the red “x”. This data represents the results for a residential home; however, this solution is scalable to any size.
After graduating, I founded OffGrid, an organization to design sustainable energy generation systems. My work involved working on the design, patent application, and funding opportunities. Unfortunately, I was unable to secure funding for this organization and found a job a few months after. I uploaded the algorithm on GitHub and released all potential proprietary rights, pertaining to the system, into the public domain. AMA
My Proof is a technical document with more information about the system and a link to the algorithm.
Submitted October 11, 2017 at 07:42PM by LiveWithEarth http://ift.tt/2gcEiet IAmA
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