IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2017 - 36

By Mohammad Shahidehpour, Zhiyi Li,
Wenlong Gong, Shay Bahramirad, and Marc Lopata

a Hybrid
ac/dc
nanogrid
The Keating Hall
Installation at the
Illinois Institute of Technology.
OLLOWING THE EMERGENCE OF MICROgrids, the concept of nanogrids has been
proposed for assimilating distributed energy resources in low-voltage applications. In
principle, a nanogrid has a similar structure to a microgrid, but it is spread out in a much smaller
geographic area (e.g., a single building) and usually entails
a much smaller capacity. Nanogrids are designed to satisfy
very specific objectives within a microgrid. For instance,
the surgery building within a hospital campus or the police station within a university campus could be regarded
as critical operations that would be designed as nanogrids.
The implementation of nanogrids is also subject to fewer
technological challenges than those encountered in microgrids. In accordance with the increasing popularity of
solar-plus-storage utilization at a single-building level,
nanogrids tend to flourish with time, thereby meeting the
goals of smart-grid technology to enhance the economic
advantages, sustainability, reliability, and resilience of
electric power services supplied to electricity customers.
The nanogrid was traditionally designed as a diesel-based,

F

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MELE.2017.2685858
Date of publication: 31 May 2017

36

I E E E E l e c t r i f i cati o n M agaz ine / j un e 2017

off-grid installation to supply basic loads in remote locations of the world. What is different here is the introduction of an ac/dc technology that utilizes control and
communication strategies embedded in smart grids for
supplying critical loads in a urban-based microgrid.
Keating Hall, depicted in Figure 1, which is located at
3040 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, on the main campus
of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), is a bilevel building with approximately 64,524 ft2 of space. As the IIT sports
center, Keating Hall is viewed as the ideal location for continuous improvement of energy reliability and efficiency by
realizing the benefits of renewable energy generation and
demand-side management. With financial support from
the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois Department of Economic Opportunities, Illinois
Clean Energy Community Foundation, Willdan Energy, and
Schneider Electric, we transformed in July 2016 to a hybrid
ac/dc nanogrid (called the Keating Nanogrid hereafter).
The Keating Nanogrid is operated as part of the campus
microgrid at IIT (referred to as the IIT Microgrid hereafter).
The IIT Microgrid features a high-reliability power distribution network that can be divided into seven separate loops.
2325-5987/17©2017IEEE



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2017

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