Dive Summary:
- Oak Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, has been chosen from a list of competing volunteer neighborhoods as the test site for smart grid technology.
- The project is a joint venture between the Korean Smart Grid Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Energy Development and will involve 12 or 13 solar panels on the roofs of 100 residential and 100 multifamily buildings.
- Upon completion of the test, the building owners will get to keep the installations, which are worth between $20,000 and $30,000 each.
From the article:
The total bill for the project will be $5 to $6 million, though Oak Park itself will not have to pay the tab. Half the cost will be covered by the South Korean research institute, and the other by the ISED’s efforts to secure government funding. Oak Park’s residents are instead agreeing to participate in the project, to allow workers to set up the installations on their homes, and to allow data about their power usage to be gathered and transmitted digitally for further study and development of the technology. The information will be collected as an aggregate in order to help protect individuals’ privacy, and to keep the experiment consumer-oriented.
As with other smart grid systems, the Oak Park project will allow for two way communication between consumers and the grid hub, which will lessen the chances of outages and help improve efficiency of energy use. ...
