About 20 business information systems students from the College of Business took a two-hour tour of Portland General Electric’s Salem Smart Power Center on Feb. 10.
The tour was the annual BIS field trip arranged through the Portland chapter of the Society for Information Management. Pradeep Kumar of Portland SIM was the organizer.
The power center is a new battery storage facility and part of the larger Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project. The Bonneville Power Administration calls the center a first-of-its-kind facility and one of the most advanced electrical systems in the nation.
Rene Reitsma, BIS professor at the College of Business, describes the Smart Power Center as a five-megowatt bank of lithium-ion batteries used “to smooth out supply and demand and store renewable energy.” In the event of a citywide PGE outage in Salem, the grid-tied batteries could meet the needs of every customer for 15 to 20 minutes, long enough to get backup generators online.
Reitsma said the tour focused on the vast IT requirements of the battery system, which according to the BPA involve 67 separately addressed Internet devices communicating on two different networks within the facility.
BIS student Jacob Roller was invited to “sit down at a computer and play with the battery,” Reitsma said. “He’d take 150 kilowatts and push it into the net, then pull it back out. We thought it was just going to be a simulation, but it was real. It was so much fun.”
Joining the College of Business students on the tour were students from the University of Portland, Oregon Institute of Technology, and the University of Washington-Vancouver.
