Jay Clemens
Siemens, Omnetric Group and CPS Energy have worked together to deploy a microgrid system at Joint Base San Antonio – Fort Sam Houston as part of the Energy Department‘s effort to integrate disparate renewable resources.
The system comprises a 20-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array, a 48-kilowatt hour battery, a weather station and a microgrid controller, Siemens said Thursday.
The final deployment is part of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Integrated Network Testbed for Energy Grid Research and Technology Experimentation project with the goal to help utilities address issues with streamlining distributed assets into the grid.
Siemens and Omnetric previously tested a software technology that combines the former’s Microgrid Management Software and the Open Field Message Bus architecture at utility firm Duke Energy as part of NREL’s initiative.
Mike Carlson, president of Siemens’ digital grid business, said MGMS is intended to help power producers utilize agile processes and integrate renewable systems.
Omnetric worked to validate and implement the OpenFMB interoperability reference architecture for the microgrid deployment at the Texas military post, while CPS Energy held demonstration tests on the system.
As a partner for the project, the University of Texas at San Antonio also provided its solar PV and load forecasting technology to monitor real-time cloud movement and feed the data into the Siemens and Omnetric microgrid system in effort to predict power generation.
