Peña Station NEXT: Visualizing a Net-Zero Energy District (Text Version)

Below is the text version of the Peña Station NEXT: Visualizing a Net-Zero Energy District video.

Martha Symko-Davies: The Peña Next Station is sitting on a 400-acre site with solar, with storage, with building technology, with transportation. And so how do we think about the optimization of all these technologies at the building level, but then also partnering it to the electrical system as well.

Bri-Mathias Hodge: So the real challenge here is how do you design a net-zero energy district so that everybody wins: the developer, the utility, and the community at large, the customers, ultimately. So the visualization really brings this to life for the different stakeholders. It's one thing to sit in a room and look at a blueprint of a feeder topology and say we're going to put some solar here. What this allows us to do is to show the utility and developers the impact it's going to have on the system and easily make changes and show how those changes translate through the system. So, for example, if you put more solar PV panels here, what does that do to your net-zero energy impact but what does that do to your power system in that location, as well.

Kenny Gruchalla: We understand the world by walking through the world, by interacting with the world. And that's what we're trying to bring to computational data through our immersive virtual environment, is the ability to walk through the data.

Kate Doubleday: So that instead of just planning individual buildings, or just putting PV on individual households, we're looking at the district as a whole, so that we can get district-level efficiencies.

Matt Futch: So that step-by-step, we can build what would be, ultimately, the largest net-zero energy district in the United States.