Campus Use Case

Banyan Tree Bed and Breakfast and Eco-resort on the beautiful island of Nevis in the Caribbean is plagued by power outages and high cost of electricity. Consisting of a complex of 7 buildings scattered over many acres with mature trees and bamboo forest on the upper slopes of Nevis peak a stratovolcano. Electricity is predominately produced with Diesel generators on the island causing electricity prices to hover around 50 cents per kWh. Additionally, the owner of the resort is committed to sustainable practices that also save money.

Because of the limited land and distributed nature of the buildings on the property a more decentralized solution needed to be deployed. Solar generation is placed on five of the seven buildings with individual mini grids for each building with their own solar, storage and power condition equipment. A central energy storage system with power conditioning equipment and emergency backup generation is included that provides overall system stability.

The individual buildings are networked and aDERMS coordination technology manage and coordinates the major individual loads like heat-pumps and EV chargers to minimize over consumption and level loads (flatten the curve). Each building is a high-performance building with higher levels of insulation, and each building SHIFTS, SHEDS and SHAPES load to support and optimize the entire complex using the Dynamic Grid aDERMS technology platform.

The Coordinated Local Price Reaction (CLPR) method combines locally developed “prices to devices” as a simplified Transactive Energy (TE) market approach to coordinate supply and demand. The project consists of at least 28 kW of solar, 40 kW of grid flexible equipment housed in seven individual mini grids. The project includes 120 kWh of energy storage spread among a central location and individual cottages. The benefits of the project include 1) lower peak demands, 2) significantly lower cost, 3) scalable and adaptable as the project changes,

This project aims to increase the resorts resilience and sustainability through electrification. The industry must integrate new technology innovations and infrastructure investments to support an orderly energy transition. The impacts of DERs and large numbers of flexible loads from electrification expose the inadequacy of the current operational paradigm and our aging critical infrastructure. As buildings contend with these new challenges, it is clear we need new solutions to network and coordinate multiple systems that are geographically separated and cope with:

• Significant shifts in peak demand;
• Two-way power flows;
• Rapid fluctuations in solar output.

While the industry navigates the energy transition, it must balance three urgent objectives for future electricity systems — decarbonization, resilience, and energy justice. However, the industry also needs to keep an unflinching eye on the technical requirements for balancing supply and demand on the grid and be able to deploy solutions at scale.

aDERMS technology enables decarbonization through the intelligent and cost-effective integration of beneficial electrification (BE) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Technologically advanced coordination at the edge (smart grid) increases the distribution systems’ ability to integrate BE and DER and minimize infrastructure investments. The thoughtful, cost-effective implementation is simple, scalable, and avoids future system disruptions.