SBIR Phase I: An IoT Gateway for Energy Application

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to address the National Power Grid's inability to handle reverse power flows brought about by distributed energy resources (DER). With the accelerated and vast proliferation of DER's such as solar photovoltaic (PV), wind mills, and battery systems, predictability, stability and manageability have become tremendously problematic as found in such states as Hawaii and other world economy leading countries such as Germany. This project is the first of its kind to reduce such grid instability, leveraging leading edge research in Optimal Power Flow and Adaptive Networking technology in order to decrease power loss, minimize blackouts, and make energy accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project consists of developing a new control plane comprised of an adaptive network of sensors and gateways sensing energy grid data, analyzing and optimizing power flow parameters in controllable devices participating in energy distribution grids. The research breakthrough is the recent mathematical theory of convex relaxation of optimal power flow, enabling for the first time, the computation of a globally optimal strategy to configure and control load and generation side, including distributed energy resources in real time, at scale.