By Tom Kleckner

LANCASTER, Texas — In a darkened room, seven video screens flicker to life. A crack of lightning lights up the darkness as the rumble of thunder suddenly explodes through six speakers in the ceiling and a sub-woofer in the corner.

That’s about the time most visitors have to be peeled off the ceiling.

“We like to give people a little jump … and we’re only running the [sound system at] about 60%,” Oncor Chief Technology Officer Michael Quinn says with an impish grin.

That’s a key part of the experience in the “Immersion Room” at Oncor’s Technology, Demonstration and Education Center (TDEC) on the plains south of Dallas. The facility is a peek into the grid’s future, showcasing almost three dozen vendors and their technologies and testing whether solar power, battery storage and microturbines can be integrated on a small scale to deliver reliable power to consumers.

“We want to immerse you in an outage,” Quinn explained. “Everybody who’s been in Texas a fair amount of time can appreciate a good old-fashioned Texas thunderstorm.”

The video begins with a somber voice: “This is life without electricity, without computers, without refrigeration. To meet the expectation of our grid today, we have to … reduce the length and frequency of power outages.”

The narrator then asks, “How do we create a more resilient, secure and even self-healing power grid? How do we integrate an increasing amount of solar and wind power to the grid? Perhaps most important, how do we achieve all this and keep your monthly bill affordable?”

Unlikely Tourist Stop

The facility has hosted more than 200 tours since opening in April 2015, including three busloads of engineers attending an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers conference.

“We didn’t expect this to become a tourist destination,” said Oncor’s Don Clevenger, senior vice president of strategic planning, during the Gulf Coast Power Association’s fall conference in October. It’s Clevenger’s hologram that welcomes visitors to the TDEC with a recorded message.

The facility consists of four interconnected microgrids drawing their energy from nine distributed generation sources: two solar PV arrays, a microturbine, two energy storage units and four generators. Everything, it seems, but wind turbines — prohibited by a Lancaster city ordinance barring structures more than 35 feet tall.

The microgrids can be controlled individually or in tandem, and can be connected with the grid or operate independently. The generation resources are capable of providing as much as 989 kW in emergency situations, accounting for two-thirds of the facility’s total load. A fully functioning SCADA system controls the entire facility.

The onsite energy storage, which draws energy from Oncor’s feeders or any of the facility’s generation sources, provides the site’s voltage signal, enables renewable integration, controls the microgrid frequency and is the first generating source to respond during an unexpected loss of power.

“We use energy storage for reliability and grid purposes. That’s it, end of story,” Quinn says, disputing the notion Oncor is trying to “distort” the marketplace by becoming a generator. He says the utility has saved customers connected to the storage devices more than 39 hours of outages they would have likely experienced.

“If, through energy storage, we can make a [significant improvement] in the number of [outage] minutes you have, we think that’s the energy experience you want. We’re trying to get that right, and then propagate it.”

Oncor divides the TDEC into three zones: one comprising all the green-energy sources, another a meter shop with automated technologies and a third with traditional utility elements, such as diesel and gas generators.

“Taking the old and the new together,” Quinn says.

Few details go unnoticed. One panel in the control room has space for a future energy source, labeled simply “Future Source.”

A gray-on-white pattern and rounded edges help lend an illusion of openness to the Immersion Room’s 25×17 space giving it a sense of “cavernous intimacy,” as one Oncor director described it.

The TDEC has two sets of solar panels, one facing south and the other facing west. That allows Oncor to monitor the different paths and solar peaks during the course of the year. The panels can power the facility’s entire HVAC system and some of the lighting, besides providing covered parking. They’re designed to withstand 2-inch hailstones and 90-mph winds.

“Solar panels and hailstorms are not complementary,” Quinn notes.

Entertain and Instruct

The TDEC exists both to test new technologies and to simplify the grid’s complexity, helping vendors understand what Oncor does and how their products might serve the utility’s needs.

“We recognized we needed to try and influence the DER world, but before we could influence that world, we found out there was a fair amount of education that needed to happen,” says Quinn, comparing the Immersion Room to an “EPCOT-style” performance. “To get to education, we figured out we had to entertain you just a little bit before we got to that transfer of knowledge. If you’re bored with it, you’re not going to remember it.”

Quinn says one of his staff members — a screenwriter in his spare time — offered a suggestion on how to grab the viewer’s attention. “He said in the first 30 seconds, you have to have one of two things: either a love scene or an explosion,” Quinn says. “I knew the former would get me fired, so we did our best to get the explosion element.”

The video not only jolts the viewer with all the subtleness of a cattle prod, it also makes the grid’s complexity accessible to those unfamiliar with the industry, using everyday language to lay out its history and underscore the importance of reliability.

Understanding Storage

The idea for the TDEC came from Oncor’s discussions with energy storage vendors about price points and sales forecasts.

“We’d bring them in originally for conversations, to see if their project or product overlaps with our needs, and from there start talking about specifics,” Quinn says. “Do [the products] do what the vendor community suggests they’ll do? We wanted our own unbiased perspective.”

Oncor recognizes that DERs can be “parked” in different locations on the grid — behind the meter, or integrated in transmission.

“Our philosophy was to understand what all these resources do for the grid, and if they do something to the grid, let’s understand that too,” Quinn says. “Rather than react constantly to the change, let’s understand and anticipate the change, and then build an electric grid to facilitate it.”

Case in point: Oncor is currently testing three different energy storage devices, allowing the utility to compare and contrast performance for each one.

“You can see which one does better with lots of cycling, which one does better if you leave it dormant for six weeks,” Quinn says. “Those are different needs in the ERCOT marketplace.”

Football-Size Microturbines

Quinn points to a 65-kW natural gas-fired microturbine — “about the size of a football” — housed inside a metallic container as big as a standard domestic refrigerator. The turbine is fueled by a half-inch supply line, “the same thing you have in your home,” he says. When operating, the turbine whirs at 96,000 RPM, emitting a high-pitched sound like a jet engine.

Exhaust comes out at approximately 800 degrees Fahrenheit, making the waste heat useful in providing warmth or other “facility needs.” Quinn says that more than doubles the unit’s efficiency. Combined with its size, who’s to say consumers won’t find a use for it?

“These will be part of the electrical infrastructure,” Quinn says. “Our philosophy is to understand how we interact with it before it gets here.”

Integrating DER with Legacy Components

The center also allows Oncor to test how emerging technologies work with each other and the grid’s legacy components. Quinn uses the example of buying a fully integrated vehicle to make his point.

“Toyota is going to have all Toyota parts in that vehicle, but that’s not what the electric ecological system is going to look like in the future,” Quinn says. “It’s going to have a Toyota chassis, Chevy brakes, a Lexus steering wheel, a Cadillac engine. So to take all those and work them from a safety and optimization and harmony standpoint … we think that’s pretty stinking important.”

Quinn says Oncor has found the “controls element” of the integration experiment to pose the biggest issues.

“Most people’s individual battery cells work how they say [they] will. It’s the control of the [entire] system that’s much more challenging.”

Which begs the question: Does Oncor incent one kind of technology over another?

“We don’t make that distinction today, but I think it’s a fair question,” Quinn says. “It’s not what the customer gets out of it, but what does the grid get out of it?”

And what does Oncor, the largest transmission and distribution utility in Texas, get out of the TDEC?

A greater understanding of new technologies and how they mesh with the grid, but perhaps most important, an “optimized” grid that works better for Oncor’s customers.

“Excess” wires and generation translate into higher costs for customers, Quinn says. Reducing those costs can help the utility retain customers.

“If we can facilitate a low bill and facilitate the energy experience that you want, our thought is you’re going to stay connected to our service territory and Oncor.”

Click below for a promotional video by Oncor showcasing the TDEC.