Search for: All records

Residential solar installations are becoming increasingly popular among homeowners. However, renters and homeowners living in shared buildings cannot go solar as they do not own the shared spaces. Community-owned solar arrays and energy storage have emerged as a solution, which enables ownership even when they do not own the property or roof. However, such community-owned systems do not allow individuals to control their share for optimizing a home’s electricity bill. To overcome this limitation, inspired by the concept of virtualization in operating systems, we propose virtual community-owned solar and storage—a logical abstraction to allow individuals to independently control their share of the system. We argue that such individual control can benefit all owners and reduce their reliance on grid power. We present mechanisms and algorithms to provide a virtual solar and battery abstraction to users and understand their cost benefits. In doing so, our comparison with a traditional community-owned system shows that our AutoShare approach can achieve the same global savings of 43% while providing independent control of the virtual system. Further, we show that independent energy sharing through virtualization provides an additional 8% increase in savings to individual owners.

 

Since many residential locations are unsuitable for solar deployments due to space constraints, community-owned solar arrays with energy storage that are collectively shared by a group of homes have emerged as a solution. However, such a group-owned system does not allow individual control over how the electricity generation from the solar array and energy stored in the battery is used for optimizing a home's electricity bill. To overcome this limitation, we propose vSolar, a technique that virtualizes community solar and battery arrays such that each virtual system can be independently controlled, regardless of others. Further, we present mechanisms and algorithms that allow homes with surplus energy to lend to homes with deficit energy. 

In most process control systems nowadays, process measurements are periodically collected and archived in historians. Analytics applications process the data, and provide results offline or in a time period that is considerably slow in comparison to the performance of many manufacturing processes. Along with the proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and the introduction of "pervasive sensors" technology in process industries, increasing number of sensors and actuators are installed in process plants for pervasive sensing and control, and the volume of produced process data is growing exponentially. To digest these data and meet the ever-growing requirements to increase production efficiency and improve product quality, there needs a way to both improve the performance of the analytic system and scale the system to closely monitor a much larger set of plant resources. In this paper, we present a real-time data analytics platform, referred to as RT-DAP, to support large-scale continuous data analytics in process industries. RT-DAP is designed to be able to stream, store, process and visualize a large volume of real-time data flows collected from heterogeneous plant resources, and feedback to the control system and operators in a real-time manner. A prototype of the platform is implemented on Microsoft Azure. Our extensive experiments validate the design methodologies of RT-DAP and demonstrate its efficiency in both component and system levels.