In Search of Perfect Power

James M. Hylko

What do you do when your research institution is losing roughly half a million dollars annually as a result of multiple electricity outages — and electricity demand keeps rising? If you’re the Illinois Institute of Technology, you turn the challenge into a campuswide learning experience by teaming with the Galvin Electricity Initiative and other experts to design and construct a prototype Perfect Power System (PPS). Even during its implementation, the PPS promises to provide more reliable and sustainable electricity to the university at a lower cost than it had been paying.Between 2004 and 2006, the 120-acre campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago (see cover photo and Figure 1) experienced an average of three unplanned electricity outages per year. Those outages ranged from partial to complete loss of load on the main campus and cost the university an estimated $500,000 annually in destroyed experiments, damaged equipment, lost productivity, cancelled classes, and other consequential damages.

Taken from Powermag.

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