The ability to store and shift electrical power over time is becoming more important as economies increasingly adopt renewable power sources. Meshed AC power grids have limited controllability and cannot effectively handle congestion of key transmission lines during sporadic peaks and valleys of input power such as that produced by solar and wind sources. Conventional unified power flow controllers (UPFCs) mitigate the congestion problem by balancing the load across transmission lines but require expensive large transformers with high losses.

Background: A dual active bridge (DAB) DC-DC converter is ideally suited for high-power galvanically isolated DC-DC conversion. The DAB DC-DC converter has advantages of high power density Zero Voltage Switching (ZVS) bidirectional power transfer capability a modular and symmetric structure and simple control requirements. The DAB DC-DC converter can also be used for multi-port operation which is a feature that is useful in interfacing several DC sources and loads using a single converter.

There is great potential for small low-cost wireless sensors to pervade society such as sensors for electricity grids environmental pollution and emergency situations. However to realize this ubiquity these sensors must have low-cost long-life power sources. Harvesting ambient energy has the potential to meet the needs of these wireless sensors.To address this opportunity researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a new type of energy harvester. This Berkeley harvester obtains its energy from nearby energized conductors.

Background: In order to improve energy utilization and correspondingly lower energy use and cost there is growing interest in improving the intelligence of the electricity grid and in particular improving the intelligence of the vast infrastructure of power distribution cables. Technology Description: To address this need researchers at UC Berkeley have developed an innovative way to measure the applied operating voltage inside conventional AC high-voltage insulated power distribution cables.

The Problem 400 million Indians and 1.6 billion worldwide lack access to the electricity grid. They are already spending $50+ billion per year on lousy solutions such as kerosene fuel for small lanterns. The good news is that effective decentralized energy solutions already exist such as household solar energy systems and community-scale solar “microgrids”. The problem is that these clean energy technologies involve significant up-front costs and therefore must be financed. Consumers have a proven willingness to pay for energy services but investors are needed to finance the upfront CAPEX.