Energy Hill

Project Description

We are developing a showcase of renewable energy and sustainability-related technologies near the BCSE and the blue water tower. The location is called “Energy Hill” and currently features a 9 kW PV array, a 1 kW wind turbine, and a greenhouse. We would like to be able to bring wifi communication to the site to enable data acquisition and control of the many system currently on energy hill, and with the ability to accommodate additional systems as they are added. Specifically, we request:

Develop an interactive web-portal for Bucknell Energy Hill. Goals of this project include:
– presenting ongoing research projects/results in a visually appealing manner
– interfacing with the solar array to collect real-time solar generation data
– working with L&IT to bring wireless access to the energy hill site
– developing a web-based monitoring and control system to accommodate current needs and enable future projects
– interfacing with existing weather monitoring systems to collect and display real time weather and solar resource data.
– enable control of Energy Hill systems (e.g. lights, pumps) using measured data with the option of remote override/reset via the web interface.
– incorporate user-configurable email/text alerts to be generated from measured data (e.g. loss of power, no water in the tank).
– incorporate data from the wind turbine including realtime power and aggregate energy production.

Goals

Constraints

N/a

Impact

An outward facing web page for the site would help us to build awareness of energy-related activities on campus. This would have value to current students, faculty and staff, as well as to prospective students. The data streams would also be useful to on-campus researchers.

Resources

We have budget for most of the data collection hardware, and possibly the network equipment. I am not certain what software will be required to be purchased.

Group Summary

The purpose of this project is do provide real time data and control of existing systems at Bucknell. A webpage that displays the current data is required. The webpage should have two purposes, one is for people to control and view data for the current systems. The second purpose is to provide high level details to people who do not know about the systems. Also access to the current systems through the website is also desired. Lastly there should be a notification system to notify certain users when levels pass into predefined thresholds.

Identified Pains

Manually review every system, there are many different systems that are currently in use and there is not a place where you can view information about all of them at the same time.

Systems are separate and not connected.

Data is not organized, many of the systems produce lots of data, this data might have “noise” in it that needs to be filtered out.

No real-time review of data.

Proposed Problem Description

Take the existing power production and utilities systems that are in place and create a way to monitor them. There should be a way for specific data to be viewed by experts in the power production that not everyone can access. Also there should be a way for non informed users to understand the real time data. There should be a way to control the systems remotely and to get notifications about systems remotely.

Combine all current systems into an updated, remote/mobile solution.

Proposed Goals

Develop a website to display the real time production data of the power systems. Make a database to log the data in. Create a remote access system for the current systems.