Oak Park to Demonstrate Resilience With Smart Grid

Oak Park neighborhood — A demonstration program will put PV modules on houses and use those to supported a distributed, smart-grid initiative. Photo: Redfin.com

A recent story on Grist.org describes how the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois is embarking on a far-reaching program to demonstrate a resilient power grid using smart-grid technology. With support from the Korea Smart Grid Institute, which carried out a similar demonstration on Jeju Island off South Korea, and the International Institute for Sustainable Design, Oak Park will be installing solar-electric (PV) systems on houses and providing utility-interactive battery storage systems. When the utility company needs extra capacity, they will be able to switch the distributed rooftop PV systems so that they feed power into the grid, with homeowners and businesses relying on battery storage.

Click to access the full article, “Oak Park test drives a blackout-proof, solar-powered smart grid.”

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Tags: Communities/Cities/Energy efficiency/Renewables/News/Power interruption

One thought on “Oak Park to Demonstrate Resilience With Smart Grid”

Chris Webb says:

January 30, 2013 at 3:23 pm

This sort of decentralized smart grid system is great to see becoming a reality. I hope we get to see a similar push for “Smart Water Grid” approaches to exploit synergies with stormwater management and water conservation based around a hybrid cistern/detention vault as the “Battery”.

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David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.