Towards a Real-World University Campus Micro-Grid

In the last couple of years, the use of renewable energies, mainly photovoltaic and wind, and their integration into Smart Grids (SG), has become more appealing. Renewable Energies reduce electrical energy production cost while promoting ecological measures. Micro-grids (MG), and distributed energy resources (DER), are gaining further momentum around the world as the main building blocks of SG. MG are meant to reduce the deployment and management complexity of SG by adopting a divide and conquer approach whereby SG are mainly reduced into a set of MGs. At the MG level, energy-efficiency can be further boosted via the minimization of energy loss (e.g., during power transmission) and via real-time tracking of energy production and consumption at the level of electrical appliances in order to optimize the Demand/Response (DR) variability. In this paper, we highlight issues related to real-world micro-grid deployment in a university campus. We mainly focus on profiling energy usage in campus buildings, setting power distribution system architecture, and pinpointing key micro-grid components. We propose a general MG testbed and simulate the operation of proposed MG model/architecture. We delineate relevant pros and cons towards a futuristic real-world/physical MG deployment in a university campus.