Modeling and Simulation of the UC Irvine Campus Electric Service

In this project, a map of the University of California, Irvine campus is used to trace out the electric power distributed throughout the school. The campus is powered by a variety of sources that include on-campus generation of about 10MW at the central plant, distributed solar photovoltaic, and an external Southern California Edison 66kV source. There are a total of 10 high voltage 12kV cables connected to the substation that run throughout the school to deliver electricity from the sources to the loads. Each cable is individually traced out in the map in order to see the setup of the transformers and the connected buildings. A separate drawing is then made that shows the path of each individual circuit and its associated buildings and transformers. The power usage for many of the buildings on campus is recorded at 15-minute intervals on an Itron network that is used to generate load data. The building data is then put in a Matlab/Simulink ™ file that creates a simulation using the transformers acquired from the map. The objective of this project is to create a simulation that will generate insight into how the power is used at UCI, evaluate the effect of increased campus generation, such as the addition of more solar photovoltaic or another central plant generator, and find better ways to use the power.