Building and Testing Smart Systems in an All-New Clean Slate Microgrid

While opinions may differ about whether there is a single "right size" for smart grid demonstration projects, most will agree that a village is too small and countries too large to produce meaningful results. University campuses and communities represent an appealing intermediate scale, with enough diversity to put claimed benefits and costs to the test, as well as the intellectual resources to devise innovative approaches. An ambitious program at the University of Minnesota is showing how this can be done.