Clean tech hub takes shape on Chicago’s South Side
WRITTEN
BY
Construction is underway on a plan to turn Chicago’s Bronzeville
neighborhood into a ‘smart-tech innovation district.’
Two
years after an ambitious clean energy campaign was announced for a South Side
Chicago neighborhood, construction is moving forward on a clustered microgrid,
a solar energy project at an affordable housing complex and a university-led
clean tech center.
In
2016, the nonprofit Community Development Partnership announced acampaign to
turn the Bronzeville neighborhood into a sustainable destination hub. The aim
is to boost tourism and develop local black-owned businesses by partnering
with ComEd, Illinois Institute of Technology, and other clean energy
businesses.
ComEd’s
microgrid, which faced criticism over
costs from the Illinois attorney general, will help form the first utility-scale
clustered microgrid in the country with help from the Illinois Institute of
Technology. A sun-tracking “smartflower” at the Renaissance Collaborative, an
affordable housing center in Bronzeville, is awaiting an
installation permit.
Also,
the Community
Development Partnership is providing input
on redevelopment plans at the old lakefront site of Michael Reese
Hospital, a decade-long project expected to
create 24,000 jobs and generate more than $520 million in property taxes and
$164 million in sales taxes. The site in Bronzeville is being repurposed as a
transportation logistics center with potential commercial tech space.
For
Paula Robinson, who leads the Community Development Partnership, the work of
turning Bronzeville into a center of clean energy technology is all about
building on the rich history of the neighborhood.
“At
this point, we have all these components and pieces coming together,” Robinson
said. “We have stepped out to show that Bronzeville will be Chicago’s
smart-tech innovation district.”
She
sees her work in clean energy as building on the legacy of the neighborhood.
“We are
definitely on this journey together,” she said of the community. “We’ve been
talking about the neighborhood as a black metropolis, a National Heritage
Area.”
During
much of the 20th Century, Bronzeville was a center of African American
culture and business in Chicago during an era when redlining and other
government policies kept black residents from accessing all neighborhoods.
At a
recent event updating the community on the campaign, Howard Tullman, director of IIT’s
new innovation institute, shared a vision for the
Kaplan Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, a facility that will be
completed this fall and will be the site of classes, workshops, and
collaborations between technology professionals, students, and faculty.
“We are
the only tech-centric university in the city, and we are really in the heart of
the city,” Tullman said. “Building this project here was really important
because we are going to be training people for careers that don’t exist yet,
using technology that we will invent here. It will address problems that we
think we understand, but also problems that we don’t yet know.”
Microgrid moves forward
For
ComEd, the Bronzeville project is partly about leveraging smart grid
infrastructure that has been built throughout the region since 2012. ComEd
president and chief operating officer Terence Donnelly wrote last month that
Bronzeville has undergone “one of the most robust grid modernizations programs
in the nation.”
He
added ComEd is “intent on building upon the strength of the stronger, more
flexible smart grid platform that has dramatically enhanced reliability and
customer satisfaction.”
In late
June, the utility broke ground and began laying conduit that will eventually
connect the microgrid to the ComEd system. The Illinois Commerce Commission
approved the $25 million project in February following criticism from the
Illinois Attorney General’s Office that it was too costly for ratepayers.
ComEd
and clean energy groups argued the microgrid is an important, real-world look
into the benefits integrating two microgrids. The utility developed a custom
software so its new microgrid will be able to communicate with the existing
microgrid at IIT. The goal is to optimize the use of clean energy resources in
Bronzeville, while improving efficiency and resiliency.
During
emergencies and outages, clustering the microgrids will help to identify the
critical load, according to Mohammad Shahidehpour, a chairman in the Electrical
and Computer Engineering Department of IIT.
“By
clustering, we can island the microgrid on the campus,” he said. “By islanding
it, we are in charge of our destiny. We can find out what is critical and can
keep it on.”