ARC 759 (Masters Project) - Commonwealth Studio 2020 - 2020
Decentralized Substation
Professor: Anne Filson
Faculty Advisors: Jeff Fugate, Brent Sturlaugson, Jeffrey Johnson
Consultants: Kevin Fante, Nick Spalding
The Commonwealth Studio 2020:
The Commonwealth of Kentucky has long been an ideal laboratory for the study of Architecture. Kentucky’s cities, small towns and landscapes offer multiple scales and conditions for engagement and intervention, while its distinctive heritage, industries and propensity for innovation provides a wide range of topics and challenges to explore.
As a culmination to the architecture studio sequence, the Commonwealth Studio emerged from the notion that “local” issues have global relevance and impact. Each semester, Master of Architecture students propose research-intensive projects that are both rooted in the Commonwealth’s challenges and have the potential to resonate beyond Kentucky. The Commonwealth Studio centers around research, prompting graduate students to write a project thesis, to define their research methods, and to articulate a design process and project that tests a hypothesis. To support their investigations, students cultivate their own team of advisors, finding relevant interdisciplinary faculty, experts and stakeholders to consult throughout the term.
The Commonwealth Studio aims to challenge you to understand your own intellectual preoccupations, ambitions, and motivations through being able to argue and defend your own agenda. Students learn to develop a thesis statement in the form of an argument that clearly defines the project, its relevance, methods of investigation and its objectives. In the studio, students participate in an ongoing conversation while working independently on individual projects, making the environment more like a design collective than traditional design studio. Faculty coordinators function as provocateurs, advocates and choreographers, rather than as the traditional studio critic leading the class on a specific project. This format encourages you to develop your own priorities, find your own rhythms of production and feedback, and to advance your ability to be both reflective and self-critical.
Project Overview:
The project as a whole is a demonstration of a decentralized energy model for local communities. With the growth of the sprawling suburbs after WWII, energy grids were forced to expand great distances. This further drives the need for buildings in our built environment to become their own energy plants. The project will be at an urban scale context covering a neighborhood and its surrounding environment. The project will be a community center with energy storage as well as a place to educate the public on energy use and production as well as a place to continue to develop technologies that will further advance energy collection and usage. The program will include a space for energy consumption (PV solar panels, Pavegen, etc), energy storage (battery storage location), and distribution (connection back to the grid).
Hidden Cost of Our Electrical Grid
Energy Process:
When we go to flip a switch, we probably are not thinking about what is happening that is allowing for whatever is at the other end of that switch to turn on and work. The truth is, it’s a massive operation that starts with the mining of natural resources. These resources are located deep in our earth’s core. Once mined, they are transported to large facilities known as generating stations. These generating stations put electricity out onto what is known as our electrical grid. Once on the grid, electricity travels for miles to reach thousands of end consumers. One thing that most people do not realize is that this process at the generating station takes place on demand. Meaning, when we flip that switch, that process at the generating station begins and the electricity is being produced and sent to us at that very second.
Our houses receive 120/240V of electricity. Compared to the 345,000 V (on avg.) being put out onto the grid from the generating station, we can rationalize that there is some work to be done before the electricity enters our buildings. This work begins just outside the generating stations at a place called a switchyard. This switchyard is responsible for directing the electricity to where it is going to be consumed. The switchyard sends electricity to satellite sites owned by the utility company throughout our communities. At these sites, the electricity voltage is stepped up or down before reaching the end consumer. These sites are known as substations. These substations feed the power on the cable lines we see on the side of our neighborhood streets. These lines connect to transformers on the utility poles that have the responsibility of the final step of the process in which it steps down the voltage to the 120/240 that we need.
I.The Problem:
“Today’s power system has served society well, with average annual system reliability of 99 97% in the United States, in terms of electricity availability”-Electrical Power Research Institute. The current electrical grid is a reliable infrastructure but what is the cost? The number one issue being the carbon footprint it has on our world. The electricity and heat production accounts for nearly 50 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. With the demand for electricity continuing to rise, we must take a serious look at how we produce electricity if we are going to reduce our carbon footprint on the earth. The good news is 70 percent of the new electrical generation infrastructure that is being proposed for construction is for renewable energy.
However, this is not the only issue with our current electrical grid. With our energy being produced on demand, there are other issues that need to be addressed. To start, there are ebbs and flows during the day of when energy is being consumed. This means that the generating stations must work harder at these times in order to meet this high demand. For the utility companies, this is seen as a business opportunity. The utility companies mark up the price to purchase electricity at these times causing price fluctuations throughout the day. These times are known as peak and off-peak hours. During these peak hours, you may be paying up to twice as much to turn on the same lightbulb that you would if it were off-peak hours.
Electrical Grid & its Inefficiency
Infrastructure:
The infrastructure of the United States electrical grid is nothing less than impressive. Expanding for miles throughout the country, the whole system is connected. This is an infrastructure that truly unites each American as it spreads across state lines. There is a chance that at one point of time in your life, the electricity you were using came from a generating station from another state. This network plays an important role for our country. If something were to happen to a LG&E (Louisville Gas & Electric) generating station in Kentucky, LG&E can buy power from a New York utility company and use its (LG&E) grid to send that power out to its customers so the end consumer does not feel its affects, though one would in their next bill cycle.
If you were to take the existing electrical grid and overlay it on a map, you would see what looks like a spider web encompassing a vast amount of area. This network is a highly sophisticated grid that is broken down into three main regions 1) Eastern 2) Western 3) Electric Reliability Council of Texas (EROT). It connects the lower 48 states of the United States (Alaska and Hawaii) as well as connecting to the Canadian power grid. Each of these regions are made up of a network of sites and passageways taking up millions of acres of land.
II.The Problem
This infrastructure is just that, an infrastructure. It takes multiple sites and buildings for it to work properly and efficiently. With the grid being connected, security is a top priority for the utility companies. Some believe the biggest threat to the United States is an attack on our electrical grid. Unless you work for one of these companies, you may not know the extent in which security measures are taken, which is what they want. With this security comes land that is private to the public. This is lost land that could be used by our communities, but it is necessary with the way our current grid works. If we were to make electricity less fragile, could this open some of these sites for public use?
Another issue that comes with this vast span network is lost electricity. Electricity starts to lose voltage after it is produced. For example, when electricity comes out of the generating station, if you are within ten feet, you can hold a light bulb in your hand towards the electrical wire and it will start to light up. We can start to understand why we lose a so much electricity that initially produced since our current electrical grid has electricity traveling vast miles to reach the end consumer. For electricity going to the residential and commercial sectors, more electricity is lost than is consumed. All of these problems stem from one thing, our electrical grid being a centralized system.
Founded in 1838, LG&E serves 329,000 natural gas customers and 418,000 electrical customers across Louisville and 16 surrounding counties in Kentucky
LG&E:
The Louisville Gas & Electric company currently holds ownership of 5 generating stations. These stations serve 418,000 electric customers in the city of Louisville as well as 16 surrounding counties covering approximately 700 square miles. This ratio of generating stations to customers means that the electricity that is produced must travel vast distances in order to reach the end consumer. The consequence being that excess energy must be produced to reach the end consumer. This in turn leads to a vast amount of energy being lost everyday as well as excess natural resources being used. Another potential problem is lost electricity. If one of these generating stations has an accident, thousands of consumers will be without power or LG&E would have to purchase power from another utility company to send out onto the grid. The latter course of action requires buying even more excess electricity than originally would be produced as that electricity would have to travel even further. This cost burden would be placed upon the end consumer in their monthly electrical bill.
LG&E Footprint:
One generating station (Trimble County) occupies a site of 2,400 acres. It is comprised of two coal fired units and six combustion turbines. It has a switch-yard on site and puts out 352,000V of electricity out onto the grid. One destination of this electricity is the Middletown Substation located roughly 40 miles away. This transmission substation supplies multiple distribution substations, two being within a 10-mile radius. LG&E has 116 distribution substations that they consider Class A substations. They have multiple classes but those cannot be reported for security reasons. Each of these requires a minimum of 1 acre of land, a half-acre for equipment and a half acre for a boundary from the public for safety and security concerns. This network takes up valuable land throughout our communities, not just for the substations but also right of way passage for the cable lines. This network is currently a lost opportunity within our communities.
LG&E Distribution Substation Network:
The infrastructure of the electrical grid creates a network throughout our community. The generating stations, switch-yards, and substations are physical anchors in the network as the electrical cables provide spatial clearances connecting the physical sites.
“The primary means of energy generation is going to be solar. It will at least be a plurality, and probably be a slight majority in the long term.”
Utility companies own a network of sites that are vital to the reliability of our electrical grid, but when our electricity production becomes decentralized, architectural opportunities arise. These functional sites will still serve a vital role in the community but in a different facet.
Current Distribution Substation:
Our distribution substations currently receive electricity and redistribute it out to our surrounding neighborhoods. These are private sites that serve the surrounding community.
Decentralized Substation:
When our energy becomes decentralized, the question becomes “What happens at these sites that were once needed to supply electricity to the end consumer?”
Future Distribution Substation:
Turning the end consumer into the producer, we will eliminate the need for electricity to travel long distances. These distribution substations will now need a new program to serve its community.
Decentralized Substation:
Distribution substations are currently owned by the private utility companies. When energy production becomes decentralized, it makes sense for these sites to become a site that functions for the community. This means an analysis will need to be done at each location to determine the ideal program to now serve these sites.
Site Analysis:
For the safety of the community and the utility company’s equipment, distribution substations must have barriers from the public. This leads to barriers being placed within communities hindering pedestrian traffic and promoting automotive transportation. Redeveloping these substations to benefit the surrounding community opens the opportunity for community engagement.
Energy Campus
5241 Bardstown Road
Louisville, KY 40291
Site:
Located in Louisville Kentucky on the boundary of Jeffersontown and Fern creek, covering 21.5 Acres, a local distribution substation emerges. Rising from the intersection of Bardstown Road and South Hurstbourne Parkway, it is hard for one not to notice the purpose of this site. Large metal steel towers merging from the soil, large swaying cable lines swinging in the air, a fence clearly intended to turn away the normal day pedestrian, this is clearly a location involving electricity. The sad part is, this site has so much potential for being an amazing architectural design. It is located at an intersection of two main arteries of the city, provides a natural plinth to draw ones eye, natural vegetation, facing due south for maximum sun exposure, and has a topography surface that would make any designer who likes a challenge, fall in love with.
Site Layout:
The Golden Ratio of 1.618 has been around for years and was used in some of the most iconic architectural projects in the world (The Parthenon, Great Pyramids, Notre Dame). This ratio is said to give pleasing dimensional relationships and what is a better place to use it than at a site that has been an eyesore for years in one of the highest traffic areas of the community? The ratio was formed using a typical grid layout with dimensions of 76’x123’. This grid was overlaid onto the site orienting close to due south with the existing transmission cable lines right-of-pathway. Using the grid and orientation, the site was further broken down into 4 zones: 1) Private Wing 2) Community Campus 3) Public Wing 4) The Highline. The Public Wing extends off the Highline that is connecting to the site at the north end. This wing will bring the community residents into the site as a destination spot among the Highline. The private sector is located at the western third of the site. This wing acts as a border (sound and physical) between residential inhabitants close to the site. Spanning and connecting these wings is the community campus. Though the whole site acts as one functioning campus, this zone is what gives the site its campus feel. This zone uses the topography to its advantage in order to give the site a natural feel.
