Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
UCF wired to teach digital power grid
everything seems destined to be made smarter, including cars, phones and even light bulbs, that trend includes the biggest device in most communities: the lines, transformers and switches that constitute an electrical grid.
Grids are getting brainier, or more computerized, and capable of swifter decisions and actions than those that humans can now handle. That’s why the giant engineering firm Siemens has invested $750,000 to open a small but highly wired classroom at the University of Central Florida to teach students how to run a digital grid.
An ideal “self-healing” example of what a smarter grid would do is detecting a neighborhood outage and restoring power in less time than it takes to read this sentence.
In the old days, and often still today, a utility wouldn’t know lights were out until it got calls from disgruntled customers.
Workers would drive slowly down a street or alley, scanning lines and poles for trouble.
In the way that phones have already gone, smart grids are becoming incomparably more capable than their earlier versions, but they also are more vulnerable to technology breakdowns or cybersabotage, according to UCF and Siemens.
“If you look at today’s electric grid that starts with the power plant that everybody is familiar with and the dam that generates power, and now it’s starting to include photovoltaic solar panels and batteries and windmills,” said Michael Carlson, president of Siemens Digital Grid, North America, “that continual change in what is arguably the most complex machine ever built is demanding more and more expertise and more and more digitalization and more automation.”
Early this week, workers were snaking bundles of yellow cable through the rectangular classroom at UCF, installing 70-inch monitors and getting desks set for 17 students.
Seated at a computer in another classroom, Matt Aberman, a graduate student in electrical en-
gineering, demonstrated Siemens’ software.
He showed how students will have simulated control of UCF grid factors that include weather, output of a small power plant, the cost of electricity from Duke Energy and a campus that serves the nation’s secondlargest student body.
The software also would incorporate UCF’s anticipated construction of a 14-megawatt solar plant, which would be the region’s largest.
Aberman said the classroom’s simulated controls of a grid are cutting-edge, but many of the features are used by industry now. “That’s going to want to make students want to engage and learn,” he said.
Already with a pipeline to UCF students is Orlando Utilities Commission.
Clint Bullock, an OUC vice president, said the most recent past four people hired for the electricaldistribution department have been UCF graduates.
The Siemens classroom, Bullock said, will better prepare students at a time when the industry faces a wave of retirements.
The classroom will be open to students and professors from engineering, computer science and other fields.
“I need economists; I need policy experts; I need a much broader participation … for the perspective of what the energy industry is dealing with,” Carlson said.
Initially, the classroom will be about teaching.
But UCF has a long relationship with Siemens — the company has a powergeneration headquarters next door — and smart-grid initiatives of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Zhihua Qu, chairman of UCF’s electrical engineering department, said the classroom should evolve into research as students gain grid experience through internships or jobs and come back to the classroom with real-world challenges.
He said grids are becoming far more dynamic and complex, relying increasingly on solar power, wind power and batteries and calling for talents and technology that don’t exist yet.
“We want to train students so they are prepared for the future,” Qu said. “At the same time, we are going to do that research.”