Constructing homes, solar is included 

The sold out homes in the Reynolds Landing Community neighborhood have access to the electrical grid maintained by Alabama Power and a solar power network for the neighborhood. Its also fitted with a natural gas-powered backup generator to generate more than 586,000 kilowatt hours of power yearly that’s sufficient to service neighborhood on its own. "Our industry's changing a good bit. There (has been) a lot of speculation about what that change would look like and a lot of internal debate about that future," says Todd Rath, a marketing services director at Alabama Power who served as the project lead for the Reynolds Landing development. "This is not an energy efficient project or a connectivity project or a distributed generation project, per se. It is sort of a macro project of how all those things work together and what our customers will look like and how we'll serve them going forward."
 

Construct houses to interconnect neighborhoods

These efficient homes may alter the construction in our area and how to market homes moving forward. Alabama Power partnered with Signature Homes to construct  houses to  interconnect  neighborhoods  with the microgrid web. Each home is also fitted with state-of-the-art, energy-efficient appliances that allows future residences to be 35 percent more energy efficient than a standard home. An interactive screen on each residents' refrigerators will provide information of how their home uses electricity. It gives exact breakdowns and statistics on how they're utilizing power.

The project was borne out of a desire from Alabama Power to better understand microgrid and renewable energy options as U.S. technology become increasingly conscious. Microgrid technology has exploded since global revenues from microgrids jumped 29 percent between 2015 and 2016 to $6.8 billion, with revenues in the U.S. hitting $2.2 billion in 2016. The global microgrid market to be worth $17 billion in 2017. That total is expected to nearly double to $33 billion by 2023. Traditional utility providers have taken notice of the upstart energy option's growing viability. Many have attempted to set up research centers to educated themselves of  how to provide power to a population no longer depend on  energy grid.
 

Experimenting the eco friendly way 

Riley is the director of the Penn State GridSTAR research center at the school's Navy Yard branch in Philadelphia. The GridSTAR Center funded through Department of Energy grants. Riley describes it, "we were able to build a microgrid with solar energy storage and all of the bells and whistles so we can learn and experience all of the things we could bring together." Penn State researchers experiment on developing their own clean and renewable power grid. Alabama Power continue experimenting with microgrid options to strive to  foster  a more resilient, predictable and possibly cleaner energy infrastructure.

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