Building owners in downtown Chicago are hoping to push forward a project aimed at creating a "smart grid" of energy-efficient and energy-producing buildings.
"building owners have developed a plan to capitalize on the latest advances: Smart-grid technologies that will convert the city's iconic skyline into what backers call a 'virtual green generator' by retrofitting highrise buildings and the existing electrical grid to a new hyper-connected intelligent-communications backbone. Simultaneously, researchers at local universities, among them the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have been developing their own cutting-edge smart-grid technology.
'We want to make Chicago a hub for smart-grid manufacturing and deployment,' said Andrew Barbeau, the managing director of the Center for Electricity Innovation at IIT."
Chicago could be the site of the largest scale pilot project in smart grid technology.
FULL STORY: Smart Grid City
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