The Lehigh University campus as a virtual power plant

PI: Rudy Shankar

Co-PI(s): N/A

University: Lehigh University

Industry partner: DERNetSoft

Aggregating and harnessing a community’s targeted distributed energy resources (DER) offers substantial energy, economic, and environmental benefits to its business owners and residents. At the same time, this approach improves utility and regional grid operations by reducing the most expensive component of our current centralized electricity model: the system peaks. This solution represents a new distributed, integrated, smart, and balanced energy system for the state and beyond. It enables communities (both physical and logical) to accelerate their energy, economic, and environmental goals related to renewable energy targets, GHG emission reductions, increased energy resilience and security, regional economic development, lower cost grid operations, and smart city innovation that optimizes existing community resources. An aggregated network of DERs can serve as a virtual power plant (VPP), which can optimize these targeted resources rapidly across the state in a replicable solution.