A Tour of America's Fanciest Microgrid
It is a Friday, and Byron Washom is obliged to give yet another tour of the microgrid at the University of California, San Diego. Last week it was utility executives, and next week it would be a honcho from the Navy. The requests keep coming in. "It's just nonstop," he said. Washom, the university's director of strategic energy initiatives, unplugged his white Nissan Leaf (parked at one of the university's 56 electric car plug points) and settled in for a three-hour tour. The campus is a big place, 1,200 acres on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and the nation's most ambitious microgrid is distributed all over the place.