Alabama Power’s Smart Neighborhood wins Environment + Energy Leader award
Alabama Power’s Smart Neighborhood project at Reynold’s Landing at Ross Bridge in Hoover won a Top Project 2021 award from Environment + Energy Leader. Alabama Power, PowerSecure and Southern Company were recognized at the Environment + Energy Leader Solutions Summit Tuesday.
Environment + Energy Leader is an industry resource for news, best practices and research related to energy and sustainability. This is the latest recognition the Smart Neighborhood project has received.
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PowerSecure designed, engineered and deployed Alabama Power’s Smart Neighborhood. The community was built as part of Southern Company’s research initiative to determine what neighborhood and smart home automation could look like in 2040.
The concept of the Smart Neighborhood is to study distributed energy resources in the residential market and demonstrate how these assets work with the existing electrical grid. The neighborhood is powered by an advanced community-scale microgrid executed by PowerSecure, which integrates a 330 kW ground-mount solar PV array, a 400 kW natural-gas generator and a two-plus hour, 300 kW lithium-ion battery storage system.
The microgrid provides solar energy to the community during normal conditions and seamlessly powers the community during outages. By integrating advanced home construction methods, smart home automation and distributed energy resources, Southern Company and its operating companies can shift to optimize their customers’ ever-changing energy needs.
“This successful Smart Neighborhood microgrid project is paving the way for the future of neighborhoods and worth replicating on other new residential projects,” the judges said of the project.
Alabama Power has expanded elements of Smart Neighborhood into other areas of the state since launching Reynold’s Landing in 2017 and opening it in 2018.
“Understanding how our customers interact with their homes through these enhanced technologies allows us to better serve them in the future,” said Todd Rath, Alabama Power’s Marketing director. “It’s really bringing tomorrow into today’s world.”
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In its ninth year, the Environment + Energy Leader Awards program works with unaffiliated judges who score entries based on rigorous criteria. Smart Neighborhood was recognized along with other top products and projects from across a variety of industries for success in providing significant sustainability and energy management results.