Carnegie Mellon University announced the winners of its first-ever Allegheny Region Cleantech University Prize, as one of eight regional contests that spur innovation at the collegiate level. With the support of the US Department of Energy, the Cleantech University Prize is hosted by top academic research institutions around the country to connect startups with premier access to the advanced resources and training capabilities available on America’s university campuses.

DR-Advisor (Demand Response Made Easy)—a first-time champion from the University of Pennsylvania—competed against 15 teams to take home the $50,000 Energy Department prize at this year’s inaugural event earlier this month. “This data-driven demand response recommendation system is like the Netflix of demand management,” said team member Madhur Behl, a postdoctoral research fellow at Penn’s Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab (mLab) and the PRECISE Center. See http://energy.gov/oe/technology-development/smart-grid/demand-response

By marshalling historical meter and weather data as well as set-point and schedule information, DR-Advisor supplies an affordable approach for predicting a building’s power consumption and facilitating a plan for demand-side modeling, all without having to learn the complexities of the building. Real-time electricity pricing and demand response has become a clean, reliable and cost-effective way of mitigating peak demand on the electricity grid. The team considers the problem of end-user demand response (DR) for large commercial buildings, which involves predicting the demand response baseline, evaluating fixed DR strategies and synthesizing DR control actions for load curtailment in return for a financial reward. Using historical data from the building, they build a family of regression trees and learn data-driven models for predicting the power consumption of the building in real-time. They present a method called DR-Advisor, which acts as a recommender system for the building’s facilities manager and provides suitable control actions to meet the desired load curtailment while maintaining operations and maximizing the economic reward. They evaluate the performance of DR-Advisor for demand response using data from a real office building and a virtual test-bed. See http://mlab.seas.upenn.edu/dr-advisor/

The Cleantech University Prize, formerly known as the National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition, has attracted more than 1,000 teams, resulting in more than 70 ventures, 120 jobs and $60 million in follow-up funding. Since its inception in 2011, entries have come full circle to achieve working prototypes at commercial scale.

In April, Cleantech University Prize competitions will include Rice University, the Clean Energy Trust Challenge in Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rutgers University. The contest culminates with the National Prize in June. See more at the Department of Energy website: http://energy.gov/eere/articles/carnegie-mellon-launches-allegheny-region-cleantech-university-prize