New Centennial Campus Building to be a Distributed Energy and Green Grid Showcase
Can a privately developed building on a university-owned research park and campus become a showcase for integrating the century-old, centralized power grid with alternative technologies such as wind and solar?


RALEIGH, NC, July 24, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Can a privately developed building on a university-owned research park and campus become a showcase for integrating the century-old, centralized power grid with alternative technologies such as wind and solar?

Centennial Campus is about to find out.

NC State's technology and research park and campus recently completed construction on the Keystone Science Center, a 72,000 square-foot facility. Among its tenants is the National Science Foundation-sponsored FREEDM Center, which plans to create a one-megawatt green grid as part of the building's infrastructure. The one mega-watt grid will serve as a test-bed for the centers' research and demonstrate the technology's potential.

"This is an important development at Centennial Campus," said Dennis Kekas, associate vice chancellor of the Centennial Campus Partnership Office. "We believe that Centennial Campus can and should be a living laboratory of innovative ideas and the Keystone Science Center is a good example of that effort."

The 1 MW demonstration lab will not only demonstrate the center-developed technologies, it will also be used to showcase the third party renewable energy technologies, such as solar, wind, fuel cell, battery storage, flywheel storage, and plug-in vehicles. A solar collection and conversion system will dot the roof. Meanwhile, a plug-in Prius will connect to a plug-in station in the FREEDM's high-bay lab. FREEDM researchers will test and evaluate how all of the different components work together in a distributed electrical system. The challenge is daunting.

"Integrating alternative technologies with the current grid system gets very complicated," said Dr. Alex Huang, center director and Progress Energy Distinguished Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State. "We hope to work through many of the issues related to integration over the next several years in the lab."

NC State is partnering with universities, industry and national laboratories in 28 states and nine countries to make distributed energy reality. The FREEDM Center is being supported by an $18 million grant from the NSF and another $10 million from institutions and industry members.

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Gene Pinder
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