IGERT Story
How Big a Solar System? How Big a Battery System? Questions From the Lab
Description
UCLA’s Smart Grid Energy Research Center is testing ways to use solar innovatively and economically.
Electricity generated by rooftop solar, when it is not used at the location where it is generated, flows into the grid. From a homeowner’s point of view, that’s a good thing, because that home’s meter turns backward in sunny locations and, in regions where policy supports solar, the system could turn a profit. But from the point of view of grid operators and utilities, is it a good thing?
Professor Rajit Gadh, Director of the Smart Grid Energy Research Center at the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science, is leading an effort to answer such questions in the laboratory and then take the answers into the real world.
Gadh talked with GTM about some questions his researchers are trying to better understand.
