Creating the energy Internet: a public-private partnership at NC State fuels a clean-energy bonanza.

PositionRESEARCH NORTH CAROLINA: NC STATE UNIVERSITY

It only takes a power outage of a few minutes in the middle of a busy workday to drive home the hazards of relying on an energy infrastructure rooted in the Industrial Age. Without the electricity delivered over the nation's power grid, commerce would grind to a halt, communication networks would fail, transportation would stop and cities would go dark. Simply put, nothing would work.

Plus, blackouts aren't easy to contain. Because the power grid is a vast interconnected network, the failure of one part can have a cascading effect, triggering successive outages down the line.

"The power grid is based on technology from the early 20th century," says Iqbal Husain, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. That needs to change."

Husain is director of the FREEDM Systems Center, a collaboration of leaders in research, industry and engineering education working to envision and then create the energy network of the future. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) leveraged by additional industry support, the Engineering Research Center has sparked the growth of dozens of clean energy businesses in Raleigh's Research Triangle, making the region an epicenter of smart grid development.

"We're trying to create a new electric grid infrastructure that we call the energy Internet," says Alex Huang, an N.C. State researcher and co-inventor of a newly patented soft-switch single-stage AC/DC converter. "We're looking at the whole distribution system. That's a huge engineering system. It's very, very complex." According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the smart grid will be more efficient and capable of meeting increased consumer demand without adding infrastructure. It also will be more intelligent, sensing system overloads and rerouting power to prevent or minimize a potential outage. It will accept energy from virtually any fuel source and--building on NSF-funded research --offer improved security and resiliency in case of a natural disaster or threat. It also will allow real-time communication between the consumer and utility, ushering in a new era of consumer choice.

Energy innovation

From its headquarters on N.C. State's Centennial Campus, FREEDM (short for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management) is coming at the challenge on many fronts, from the creation of new devices that will allow energy to flow in more than one direction to the development of the software...

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