Sustainable Integrated Grid Initiative (SIGI)

Overview

The Sustainable Integrated Grid Initiative was developed specifically to research and implement systems that demonstrate the successful integration of intermittent renewable energy, energy storage, and all types of electric and hybrid electric vehicles including mobile renewable backup generation (MORBUG). Now in its sixth year of operation, the research testbed continues to assist researchers in analyzing the operations of microgrid systems under different conditions and for different installation types using a highly reconfigurable system consisting of interchangeable technology prototypes and an open source energy management platform.

2023 Highlights

Water-Energy Energy Nexus: Application of energy management strategies for water pumping applications in the Southern California and Riverside region. Demonstration of operational energy profiles to reduce peak energy loads in regional water delivery systems. Development of water-energy nexus strategies to reduce California’s peak energy loads.

Water pumping consumes 20% of all electricity in California. UCR developed operational strategies for reducing peak demand and energy cost. Annual energy bill was $382,320 in 2021-22 which dropped to $204.030 after energy saving implementation – a saving of $177,989 in a single pumping station.

Electric Cost Comparison Pre/Post-Implementation

Bidirectional EV Charging Optimization: Cost optimization and load management strategies are evaluated utilizing data from CE-CERT’s bidirectional EV charging infrastructure and microgrid operations. Cost functions and deep learning-based models are developed to optimize energy use and microgrid functionality.

Analysis of Microgrid Islanding Operations: CE-CERT’s research explores a real-world microgrid operations at CE-CERT’s laboratory facilities. Islanding operations demonstrate the feasibility of demand response, load management, and islanding in a real microgrid. Energy management algorithms and strategies are developed, demonstrated, and optimized.

CalTestBed: The SIGI testing facility, developed with California Energy Commission (CEC) and CalTestBed, has completed projects with several companies such as Sylvatex, Alpine Hydromet, and Dakota Energy.

Sadrul Ula

Research Engineer

Sustainable Integrated Grid Initiative

Google Scholars

sula@cert.ucr.edu | (951) 827-8577

Sadrul Ula is a Research Faculty at the College of Engineering - Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT), UCR’s largest multi-disciplinary research center. He is the Principal Investigator of Microgrids and Energy Infrastructure group at CE-CERT. Dr. Ula is Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wyoming where he worked for 28 years. During 2004-2005, he served as the Energy Advisor to the Governor of Wyoming – the largest energy producing and exporting state in the USA. Professor Ula received his B.S. degree from Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology, M.S. degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, and Ph.D. degree from University of Leeds, England, all in Electrical Engineering. He did his Post-Doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before working as a Research Staff Engineer at MIT. Dr. Ula’s area of expertise is electric power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization, including renewable energy integration into the grid. He developed innovative methods and algorithms for demand side management using electric motors – the largest energy user as a group in the US. He has been PI or Co-PI of multiple CEC, USDOE, USDA, US Department of Education, EPRI and industry funded multi-million dollar projects for implementing energy efficiency improvements in solar PV, battery energy system, electric vehicle chargers and industrial motor systems. Over the last 11 years at UCR, he designed and implemented a number of microgrid systems including 2.2 MWh of battery energy system, 8 MW solar PV, multiple electric vehicle charging systems including supervisory control and data acquisition system. This includes a unique microgrid/smartgrid testbed with plug and play capability with the ability to implement and validate various Hardware in Loop (HiL) scenarios.