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Bits & Watts Initiative is a cross-campus effort of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Facilities

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Bits & Watts Lab

Bits and Watts lab

The Bits & Watts lab features two smart energy homes. In the first home, we have a full set of electric appliances, an electric energy storage unit, a water heater and photovoltaic panels on the rooftop of our building. The second home allows us to simulate the impact of thousands of various of smart appliances or distributed energy resources. These two homes are connected to a grid emulator, which allows both homes to exchange power with the grid in both sending and receiving. The lab allows faculty and students to develop and test customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs) technologies individually or as an integrated system to enhance grid flexibility and thereby ensure reliable, safe, affordable, and sustainable electric service for customers. This lab has been used to demonstrate an end-to-end, opensource system that enables real-time coordination of utilities’ centralized large assets with millions of distributed resources. It integrates embedded sensing and computing, power electronics, data analytics, and networking with cloud computing.

SUPERLab

Super lab

The Stanford University Power Electronics Research Lab (SUPERLab), led by Juan Rivas-Davila, researches the areas of scalable renewable energy integration, robust EV charging, and next generation transmission and distribution systems. In particular, it explores new solutions and circuit topologies to leverage the advantages of wide-bandgap (WBG) power-semiconductor devices.

In an ongoing collaboration with the Stanford Center for Automotive Research (CARS), the SUPERLab is developing a next generation electric vehicle (EV) charging system that could one day wirelessly charge electric vehicles with order-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency, charging speed, and convenience compared to today’s EV charging systems. The SUPERLab is developing power electronics that can intelligently and efficiently stabilize the grid, enabling a pathway towards a future electric grid built on renewable energy and powerelectronics interfaced resources.

Stanford Energy Control Lab

Stanford Energy Control Lab

The Stanford Energy Control Laboratory (SECL), led by Simona Onori, is aimed towards physics-based and data-driven modeling,control, optimization, diagnostics, and prognostics of advanced energy storage systems for automotive and stationary storage applications. It tackles fundamental questions to both improve efficiency and longevity of existing energy systems — and at the same time optimize the development of the new-generation energy systems with the ultimate goal to accelerate the transition to clean energy grid and transportation. It works closely with major industry players, academicians from domestic and international universities, and practitioners in the field of transportation and utility grid. The laboratory consists of state-of-theart battery testing equipment capable of performing real-time battery charging and discharging experiments with accurate programming control and fast data acquisition. It includes two Arbin systems, an Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), and an auxiliary system to measure cell temperature and enable Controller Area Network communication.