TransActive Grid: Turning Brooklyn Homes Into Connected Power Stations

March 16th, 2016 by Glenn Meyers

According to TransActive Grid, Brooklyn consumers can transform their homes into connected power stations.

The New York startup has developed a consumer-run microgrid — a technology which its founders hope will radically transform the way electricity is bought and sold.

“Project Exergy is an effort to turn computers into primary sources of heat. This computational and distributed model provides utilities with new integration options for recapturing wasted resources, managing both the load/shift balance and demand-response needs, and increasing customer retention through innovation.

“The LO3 concept model is a distributed computation and heating appliance platform that provides a thermal storage system as well as plug-and-play integration with a building’s existing heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems. It offers a range of cryptographically secured grid services and presents a two-fold opportunity to monetize underutilized computational capacity and store valuable thermal energy.”

This planned network will be run by TransActive Grid (TAG). placing control of production and consumption in the hands of the consumers, who can buy and sell their electricity over a secure peer-to-peer network. This presentation discusses the concept of micro-grids.

This peer-to-peer network is based on the Ethereum blockchain software technology, originally created to run the bitcoin currency, which securely monitors output from energy systems such as solar, wind, or batteries and enables it to be bought and sold in the local community.

In a press announcement, TAG co-founder Lawrence Orsini said, “This really is an exciting development in the way consumers can interact with energy, and we hope it will lead to a cleaner, greener society.

“The technology we have created takes away any hassle from buying and selling, allowing both consumers and prosumers more options to maximize the local benefits from renewable generation systems.”

How viable the financial platform proves to be remains to be determined.

To prove this concept, the company plans to roll out its first network on President Street in Brooklyn. “We hope that street will be remembered in the future as the start of a step change in the energy industry,” Orsini said.

The press announcement offers this perspective:

Traditionally, home energy producers have had to buy and sell through a centralized utility company like Duke Energy in the US or the National Grid in the UK – but that puts the control in the hands of the energy giants.

TAG connects buildings via a constantly updated secure list, stored on computing devices at each location. The Ethereum software monitors electricity-in and electricity-out at each point of the network by counting up the electrons created or stored, logging it, then selling it through a hands-off self-sustaining control system.

The basic grid in Brooklyn, the first of its kind, consists of houses with solar panels producing energy and other houses on the block set up to buy that renewable energy from, literally, across the street.

“This whole concept benefits the area you live in,” added co-founder Joseph Lubin. “By buying energy locally, rather than from a national entity, the money goes back into the pockets of people in the community.”

We remain interested in reporting on the success of this enterprise.

Image Water towers via Shutterstock









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