Team members:
- Adam Benjamin
- Kevin Brokish
- Joseph Wang
- Joel Wiechmann
- Eric Wilson
Right now about 10% of the energy our community uses is renewable energy. What if we wanted to increase this percentage to 30%? With only 10%, if there is a cloudy, not windy day the traditional power plants can make up the difference. However when relying on renewable energy to provide 30%, a cloudy, not windy day can become a big issue. So, our project is to use renewable energy sources to power a simulated city that deals with 30% of Boulder's energy consumption. Obviously we have scaled this down to actually make our working prototype. The idea is that when there is a surplus of renewable energy, we want to store that energy for the times in which there is insufficient renewable energy. We plan to store this energy one, or possibly two, ways. First is to pump water to the top of a hill. The other way is to store the energy in batteries. Our city will be made from LEDs and the buildings of the city will be made of Legos or wood. We plan to have solar panels, wind turbines, and a storage bank of energy. If possible, we would like to model other things such as an electrically powered transportation system by having a miniature car drive around the city.
The stimulus in our project is the weather, primarily sun and wind. The intelligence of our project lies in sensing the amount of power each renewable source is producing. Our response is taking the data received and deciding from what source to draw the power in order to power the city. If there is a surplus, the excess power will be sent to the appropriate device in which we have decided to store the energy.
We will display on a nearby monitor the power consumption and generation of each source as time goes on. This allows one to see specifically what is happening at each source, instead of just watching the city react to the different situations.