Melville City Smart grid Project
City of Melville aims to monitor, manage, and optimize the energy and water consumption.
The City of Melville is among the world’s most liveable and sustainable city having community engagement framework, planning processes, and comprehensive range of council services.
Project Summary
City of Melville’s Smart Grid Paralleled Mode Micro-grid project, in partnership with Murdoch University, aspires to test and optimize the ability of this approach to significantly improve energy efficiency, water efficiency, energy security and the adoption of renewable energy across distributed local government facilities. [rml_read_more]The successful implementation of the project provides an integrated system including renewable energy generation at sites, smart metering technology, an advanced long-term energy planning technique.
Challenges
It includes sustainable resources utilization and management through real-time monitoring of utility consumption and solar energy generation, reporting and verification systems, community engagement and establishing partnerships for supporting resource efficiencies and carbon footprint reductions.
The City of Melville is among the world’s most liveable and sustainable city having a community engagement framework, planning processes, and a comprehensive range of council services. Being a perfect place to work, live and relax it attracts numerous visitors accessing its facilities along with its residents, resulting in higher resource utilization such as energy and water. Hence, managing, monitoring, and optimizing resource utilization became a challenging task for the authorities, resulting in wastage of resources and high bills.
Objective
To provide a reliable monitoring system for easy and efficient management of resources and increase the overall efficiency of the city in terms of resource utilization.
Solutions
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To have valuable insights into the energy and water consumption patterns ARNOWA assessed each site and designed the plan for the installation of its smart devices. According to the requirement of different sites of the city ARNOWA installed its smart energy and water meter across the city. In-house built ARNOWA’s Current Transformers (CTs) were used to send readings to ARNOWA edge devices digitally using MODBUS protocol. ARNOWA,s smart edge devices perfoms edge computing, stores, arrange and sort data locally, before pushing the data into ARNOWA,s CARBON cloud. ARNOWA,s CARBON cloud is loaded with advanced analatical algorithm for cloud computing. 4G network was used to push data into cloud from edge devices. Post to cloud computing data were visualized on fully customisable and easily accesible dashboard.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Location
- Twenty Facilities including city’s Community Halls, Libraries, Administration Office Buildings, Operation Centre, Workshops, Parks, Eductaion Centers etc., City of Melville, WA
Challenge
- Sustainable resources utilization
- Real-time monitoring
- Reporting and verification systems
- Community engagement
- Establishing partnerships for supporting resource efficiencies
- Carbon footprint
- Solar generation monitoring
- More than 9000 Data Points monitored in real-time with less that 1 minute interval and with local as well as on cloud storage requirements
- 400 KW Solar PV Generation from around 16 inverters of different capacities monitored
- Parallel Data fed at a different frequency and with limited parameters for Blockchain Peer to Peer Trade of Electricity
Results
- City achieved its energy consumption reduction goals along with reduced carbon footprints.
- Real-time monitoring and management of energy and water consumption
- Automated controls and operations
- Better utilisations and reduced wastage of resources.
- Enhanced residents and visitor’s satisfaction
It enabled the relevant stakeholders at each site to have a clear oversight over the energy and water use, and power quality, for the whole facility, and across various parts at each site in real time. This helped the city officials to critically identify potential opportunities for improvement of energy and water usage at the sites, quantifying return on investment (ROI) for such improvements, effectiveness of energy efficiency initiatives. It helped the city in better tenant management and transparent billing across the facilities. It also helped to strengthen accountability for different users at each sites in transparently sharing city’s resources for efficient use.
Results
ARNOWA through its smart technology and devices was able to overcome all challenges faced by the city. Application of our smart devices has resulted in huge reduction in the total energy and water consumption of the city, which ultimately reduced city’s carbon footprint. Our smart ecosystem and dashboard have been successful in helping the city and its community to monitor the utilization of its resources in real-time and hence manage and optimize their resource consumption. Significant load reduction on the local grids were also identified.
