I designed a Network of Optimized Sustainable Energy Generation Systems and released my proprietary rights into the public domain. AMA. IAmA

Update: Since my last post, I have made the following improvements to the technical document/algorithm:

• Incorporated a simplified model of self-discharge losses and efficiency degradation effects into the algorithm.
• Described how SEGSs can be the building blocks to achieve 100% renewable energy in the electric sector.
• Increased the size of the example from a building to the size of an electric utility to show the scalability of the design.
• Included a description of how over a year the optimal SEGS can generate over twice the required energy which can be used to power standby devices such as atmospheric carbon dioxide extraction systems.
  

My story: While completing my MSEE degree, I got an idea for how to design SEGSs. To give some context, 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 SEGS is an off-grid (stand-alone) electric power system that independently provides reliable electric power to end users from 100% renewable energy resources. Renewable energy resources and energy storage systems are the major components of SEGSs, and the main challenge for designing SEGSs is determining how much renewable energy and how much energy storage are required to reliably supply power year-round.

I pioneered an algorithm to find the most cost-effective design for SEGSs using PV. By considering oversized PV, the algorithm approximated the energy storage requirements for increasingly oversized PV. The result was a graph showing all possible configurations of PV and energy storage. Here is an animation of what this looks like from a different example.

The previous graph shows an inverse relationship between PV and energy storage; this property is important to optimize for the cheapest system. Since PV and energy storage have different costs, the algorithm computes the price of each configuration and determines the most cost-effective system shown by the red “x”.

After graduating, I founded an organization called OffGrid to design SEGSs. My responsibilities involved working on the design, submitting a patent application, and seeking funding opportunities. Unfortunately, I was unable to secure funding for this organization and found a job a few months later. I uploaded the algorithm on GitHub and released all potential proprietary rights, pertaining to the system, into the public domain.

My Proof is a technical document describing the network of optimized SEGSs and a link to the algorithm. AMA.

Submitted January 24, 2018 at 12:18AM by LiveWithEarth http://ift.tt/2Gb0pd4 IAmA