Energy Technology Summit - Tuesday & Wednesday, August 7 & 8

Designing the Smart Grid

The theme for the 2012 summit is designing the smart grid - effective development techniques for smart grid embedded control and monitoring systems. This event will cover a wide range of topics on clean energy, grid-tied power conversion, storage, distribution control systems, and electric vehicles. You won't want to miss this in-depth technical discussion of design and development techniques for controlling the smart grid.

Building an effective developer community based on open information exchange is key to advancing the smart grid. Attend this summit to share knowledge and valuable lessons learned in the field with a worldwide group of smart grid developers. Learn about the very latest NI technologies, platforms, and graphical system design methodologies that enable you to push the boundaries of smart grid technology.

Keynotes

Sandia and Vestas: Designing a Smarter Wind Farm
To enable rapid, cost-efficient, transformative wind energy technology test and development, the US Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories are building a wind energy test center at Texas Tech University called the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWIFT) facility. Learn how a small wind park built in collaboration with Vestas Technology R&D and featuring three heavily instrumented turbines incorporates embedded NI controllers to administer DAQ and turbine control functions site-wide. This configuration allows individual turbine control and coordinated control of the entire wind park for interaction studies.

HIL at Savannah River National Laboratory and the Clemson Drive Train Test Facility

Discover how Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is adding hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) capability to its high-current laboratory. The laboratory complies with NIST standards for high-current measurement and is capable of producing current pulses up to 100,000 A. SRNL is also incorporating NI high-speed PXI hardware to capture the transients during HIL operation. In addition, hear how SRNL is partnering with Clemson University to add HIL to the 15 MW drive train test facility being built in Charleston, South Carolina.

Digital Energy: The Convergence of Energy and Information

Opening up access to energy and information has yielded positive, social transformation, but both sectors have faced challenges and disruptive technologies. These two markets are merging and following countervailing trends: while energy is moving from large, centralized power plants to smaller, distributed systems in homes, computing is moving from smaller, distributed systems in homes to larger, centralized data centers in the clouds. This interconnection introduces cross-sector constraints. At this session, learn how global energy and information interact, what conflicts are looming, and how they can work together.

Progress Energy: Smart Maintenance and Diagnostics for Electrical Power Generation

Learn about Progress Energy's large-scale monitoring and automation initiative to increase asset availability, reduce cost, and address workforce challenges. In the past, 80 percent of key maintenance and diagnostics (M&D) personnel time and efforts were spent on data collection instead of analytics. The Smart M&D project goals include using a centralized database and distributed, intelligent DAQ nodes to automate the data collection process and shift the focus to data analysis. At this session, explore Progress Energy's new M&D infrastructure featuring CompactRIO.

Energy Sustainability and How to Get There: The Power of Vision, Passion, and Teamwork

The lessons Robert Swan has learned through his polar expeditions in the harsh Arctic weather, combined with his long-term determination and vision, have enabled him to speak worldwide on the importance of teamwork, determination, and communication. Through each conference presentation, Swan is getting closer to reaching his 50-year mission of preserving Antarctica, the last great wilderness on earth. At this session, he continues to inspire, involve, and challenge leaders like you around the world to make a difference and prove that anything is possible with vision, passion, and patience.

Technical Sessions

NREL: Accelerating the Integration of Energy Systems Technology
The Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) at the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will soon be the nation's first facility to conduct integrated megawatt-scale R&D on the components and strategies needed to safely move clean energy technologies onto the electrical grid at the scale and speed required to meet national goals. Explore how NREL and energy companies can use ESIF to conduct integration tests at full power and actual load levels in real-time simulations and evaluate component and system performance before going to market.

Electrodynamical Model of the Electrical Power System for Digital Measurement and Control of Power

Examine the development of an electrodynamical model of the electrical power system (EDMPS) and the deployment of a distributed measurement and control system. The digital energy control system provides synchronous control of six independent power generators using the LabVIEW Control Design and Simulation Module and NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware to implement power control algorithms with a 100 µs response time. Learn how to use this system to define custom control algorithms, create a log of control parameters, and monitor real-time analog signals from the entire EDMPS.

A Full-Proof Development Cycle for the Power Converter Control System

Learn how advanced "piecewise affine" state-feedback controllers can improve the performance and reliability of power converters. The novel development cycle includes correct by design controller synthesis methods, rapid prototyping, and deployment of FPGA-based control systems. At each step, appropriate verification and validation techniques are applied utilizing LabVIEW/Multisim co-simulation, cycle-accurate FPGA simulation, and real-time hardware-in-the-loop (RT-HIL) testing. Also learn how you can use NI FlexRIO devices to increase the speed and accuracy of RT-HIL systems and how you can reduce the validation time of FPGA-based controllers by using peer-to-peer streaming.

Electric Vehicle High-Frequency Multiphase Power Converter Controller Design

To improve the performance of long-range electric vehicles, you can develop a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) that combines the high-energy density of lithium-ion batteries and the high-power density of ultra-capacitors. See how a high-efficiency, lightweight bidirectional DC-DC converter controlled with CompactRIO can optimize the real-time power flow between the ultra-capacitors, battery, and load. Also learn how you can use the new FPGA co-simulation design methodology and NI power electronics toolbox to develop the CompactRIO controller and protection scheme.

Instrumentation Design Considerations for Digital Energy System Monitoring and Control

Learn how to choose the right embedded reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology to monitor and control digital energy systems. Explore design considerations such as the impact of measurement resolution and sampling rate on signal harmonics. Also examine ways to implement synchronization in high-channel-count power measurements and to add external isolation to NI modules for high voltage and current signals. Hear about lessons learned while developing and deploying a wide range of electric power applications including microgrid monitoring, energy storage system characterization, and wind turbine control systems.

High-Performance Real-Time Monitoring of Solar PV Power with Integrated Building Management and Energy Meteorology

As part of its research efforts to ensure optimized performance, highest availability and proven reliability of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) has developed a monitoring and control system based on NI's CompactRIO platform, using LabVIEW coding with a total of 50-60 functional modules and overall system efficiency with <20% CPU load factor at the remote logging stations; all of this in real-time ("live data"). Combining 25 "superstations", RF mesh networks, and high-speed data-links, SERIS has deployed an island-wide communication network for: (1) PV systems monitoring; (2) energy meteorology; and (3) building management systems.

Hi-Fi PV: Advanced Data Acquisition to Enable Solar Power Production Forecasting

The Department of Energy and other entities are funding research to improve the accuracy of solar forecasting using high-resolution characterization and instrumentation of solar PV systems. Examine a high-fidelity distributed sensor network at The The University of Texasat San Antonio. The system monitors solar irradiance, power quality, and weather information at a 1 s sampling rate and aggregates all data into a centralized data center. This real-time data is then processed, presented on a web page, and loaded into a solar array simulator tool that can model the output power.

Next-Generation Instrumentation for Nuclear Power

As nuclear power plants age, the increased monitoring of plant systems and components is critical to maintaining safe and efficient operation. See how next-generation condition monitoring systems developed using LabVIEW and CompactRIO monitor important plant assets such as sensors, rotating equipment, and reactivity control rods during operation. These advanced asset monitoring systems work with wired and wireless configurations for operating nuclear power plants and research reactors worldwide.

Virtual Energy: Coordinating Distributed Energy Resources to Create a Supplemental Reserve Power Grid

To achieve the balance between power supply and demand, some countries must tap into supplemental reserve power. Discover how the Dutch power grid maintainer digitally monitors and controls entire pools of supplemental reserve power suppliers by using CompactRIO remote units distributed throughout the country and connected via the Internet to the VI Technologies server running LabVIEW web services and remote UIs. Hear why this technique works better than modern thin web client options and explore how the system was operational in only three months.

Hydro Quebec: Detecting Underground Power Distribution Faults With a Partial Discharge Diagnosis Tool for Non-expert Workers

Partial discharge (PD) detection is a growing concern in the power generation industry. The PD Sniffer automatically identifies defective components on underground medium-voltage distribution lines. Since its implementation in Quebec, the PD Sniffer has become the preferred reference tool for nonexpert workers, increasing their safety and confidence. Learn how the sniffer software was developed in LabVIEW using object-oriented programming and how advanced signal analysis algorithms such as time clustering were implemented. The LabVIEW SQL Toolkit was used to synchronize and store data on local and remote databases.

Online Protection and Automatic Fault Detection System for Hydro Generators

Explore the design of the CodiS hydro machine condition monitoring and protection system based on NI technology. Learn how the server communicates with CompactRIO hardware over TCP/IP to collect the online calculated data and how the remote data analysis client software analyzes data on the user PC. Understand the implementation of diagnostic application features on the server, which performs failure mode analysis for automatic fault detection and prediction and report generation.

Reconfigurable Grid? FPGAs Versus DSPs for Power Electronics

The recent incorporation of digital signal processors (DSPs) into FPGA devices is causing the performance per dollar of these new hybrid DSP/FPGA devices to rocket past traditional DSP hardware. Explore the new rules of power electronics design using state-of-the-art hybrid FPGA devices, LabVIEW graphical system design tools, and a new commercial deployment platform designed to reduce the cost and risk of advanced digital energy control systems. Also learn what you can achieve using the ultrafast computation, true parallel execution, and hardware reconfigurability of modern FPGAs.

Electric Power Generation: Today and Tomorrow

Electrical power is essential for the prosperity of mankind and plays a vital role in our energy future. However, there are several methods to generate electricity, each one with unique benefits and drawbacks. The Panel will bring together a group of power generation experts to discuss the current and future state of the industry, major challenges, governmental obstacles and possible solutions. This group of passionate experts will represent fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable and "virtual" power generation. Please join us as these industry leaders discuss one of the most relevant topics for society today.  

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