Project Title: Reliable and Secure Bidirectional Communications Link for Distributed Energy Resources
Funding Opportunity: Technology to Market 3
Solar Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: Santa Rosa, CA
Amount Awarded: $480,000
Awardee Cost Share: $120,000
This project is developing a combination WiFi and wireless mesh network gateway that connects distributed energy resources, such as residential solar sites, to the internet. Current single path link technologies are unreliable and 20% of fleets have dropped offline, becoming invisible to their operators. This innovative, long-range wireless mesh protocol allows widely-dispersed distributed energy resource sites to share their existing standard internet securely, significantly lowering lifetime costs.
Approach
This project extends the Operant gateway’s network capabilities by adding a cellular link to the previously demonstrated WiFi and wireless mesh. The efficient, reliable, and secure use of the three parallel connections will then be demonstrated through extended field trials of prototype systems. New software capabilities will be added to make it easier for users to request site data or issue commands.
Innovation
This project will increase the ability of distributed energy resources to connect to the internet, which is necessary for billing, maintenance, and future grid support capabilities. The network gateway under development uses a cutting edge networking protocol developed by a UCLA-led academic consortium to simplify the task of connecting devices through multiple redundant connections. This extremely lightweight software stack, is very similar to standard internet connectivity protocols, such as WiFi or LTE, with a low data rate wireless mesh neighborhood network.