Spokane building a smart city from the grid out - EF News

Urbanova Smart City Spokane connects Itron and Avista via networked streetlights, a microgrid, DERs, and transactive energy, integrating air quality sensors, solar, battery storage, and building energy management systems for grid innovation.

Smart metering company, Itron, and Avista, a utility company, are participating in an urban renewal project in Spokane, a city of 210,000 people in the foothills of eastern Washington state. The project will start with networked streetlights as part of a digital grid approach and will eventually grow to include air quality sensors, medical devices, and distributed energy resources (DERs).

Called Urbanova, the project has been two years in the making and is the first of its kind in Washington state. Urbanova will take on a challenge facing utilities that are trying to incorporate DERs into their daily operations and long term planning – how to understand and monetise the value they offer the grid, both as individual units and together via virtual power plants models. This concept goes by different names, including transactive energy, and may leverage synchrophasors for real-time visibility.

In mid-2016, the Urbanova partners received a US$7m grant from Washington’s Department of Commerce amid broader federal grid funding in Washington efforts to launch the distributed energy portion of the project. It will start with a microgrid, planned to include 200 kilowatts of solar using advanced inverters from two arrays and a combined 2.5 megawatt-hours of battery storage, and integration with two buildings’ energy management systems.

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