Energy Transition in Rural America (May 2022) - Dakota State University Madison Cyber Labs
By Jam Angulo Paniagua
Dakota State University Madison Cyber Labs is working toward more precise, beneficial load management
What could a future home look like? The Connected Home Research Project, a partnership between East River Electric Power Co-op, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, and the Dakota State University (DSU), aims to answer this question. We visited this collaborative project at DSU Madison Cyber Labs as part of our weeklong field trip. The Connected Home project started in 2019 to understand the potential of smart homes and energy management. Here, students and faculty conduct research to shed light on smart homes' potential energy savings and identify the role of utilities in optimizing customers' electricity consumption.
Staff at the Connected Home conduct research in a space that resembles a typical household kitchen. The area includes a Samsung Touch Screen Family HubTM Refrigerator, which can manage family calendars, display and identify items inside the fridge, and share pictures and music. It also has music and lights controlled by an Amazon Echo Smart Speaker, and Phillips Hue Lighting, among more than 15 other innovations. The staff at the lab is also expanding the scope of their space by including home security devices, energy consumption monitoring, and laundry equipment in their study. They are working toward having concrete results on the electricity demand reduction achieved with different settings of all the smart devices available in the lab.
Electric cooperatives have had load management programs since the seventies. By temporarily turning off specific devices such as heat pumps and air conditioners, co-ops are able to reduce their demand peaks, which ultimately mitigates the effect of higher electricity demand on their rates. The Connected Home project believes that these programs could be integrated with smart homes. Part of the initiative's objective is to create a hub that centralizes all smart devices in a household. Then, this hub could help enhance the reach of the existing load management programs in co-ops by widening the scope of appliances they work with or directly reducing a household's electricity demand.
Beyond the Connected home project, DSU Madison Cyber Labs are working on other studies related to load management and the integration of new technologies into the grid. In one of the projects they showed us, researchers simulate situations where multiple electrical vehicles are charging in a single node of the grid. Since the adoption of electric vehicles is growing, a future circumstance like this is not unrealistic. This project focuses on understanding the effect this would have on the grid’s stability. Based on that, they could identify how load management programs can help to prevent undesired outcomes like outages or smart grid communication issues. They also showed us a project investigating the implications of the growing amount of data created and shared by smart devices. They are quantifying the amount of data and researching the ways to identify possible data leaks.
We were all excited to learn about the projects hosted at DSU Madison Cyber Labs. This was a great example of utility-academia partnerships. It also sheds light on the new challenges and opportunities associated with new technologies that policymakers should start thinking about.