Solar Community Neighborhood

The sold out homes in the Reynolds Landing Community neighborhood have access to the network sustained by Alabama Power and a renewable energy network for the neighborhood. Its also fitted with a natural gas-powered backup generator to harvest more than 586,000 kilowatt hours of electricity yearly that’s sufficient to service neighborhood on its own.

These efficient neighborhood 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 network 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.

Network and Solar Energy Alternatives

The project was borne out of a desire from Alabama Power to better understand the network and clean energy options as U.S. technology become increasingly conscious.

Microgrid technology has exploded since global revenues from networks jumped 29 percent between 2015 and 2016 to $6.8 billion, with profits 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 utilities 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.

Cleaner Energy

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 solar power grid. Alabama Power continue experimenting with microgrid options to strive to foster a more resilient, predictable and cleaner energy infrastructure.

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