Black Voices

Bronzeville Community Microgrid Charts a Path to a Green Energy Future


In Chicago’s historic Bronzeville community, a project that could ultimately lead to the transformation of our energy infrastructure is quietly taking shape.

It could pave the way to a sustainable, green energy future while at the same time making the nation’s power infrastructure more resilient to everything from extreme weather to terrorist attacks.

It’s called the Bronzeville Community Microgrid and is a collaboration between the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Chicago Housing Authority and Commonwealth Edison. The project demonstrates a path to a sustainable energy future by taking an old idea and updating it for the 21st century.

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Mohammad Shahidehpour, an expert in microgrids at the Illinois Institute of Technology, noted that the very first microgrid was built in Manhattan by Thomas Edison more than 140 years ago.

“He had a power plant, he pulled wire to the neighborhood, and it was an isolated system because when Edison built the first microgrid back in 1881 there was not a grid,” Shahidehpour said. “He started turning the lights on the street and providing electricity to the neighbors, who were primarily rich people who could afford electricity at the time.”

What’s different now is that by using very advanced technologies, microgrids are more efficient, reliable and a lot more affordable, Shahidehpour said. In fact, the Illinois Institute of Technology has a microgrid that can power its entire campus in the event of a power outage to the main grid.

Commonwealth Edison’s Dale Player, vice president for engineering and smartgrids, said Bronzeville is the “perfect place” to develop microgrid technology.

“Bronzeville is a very important community to Chicago,” Player said, “and Bronzeville is very important to ComEd. It’s got a lot of heart, it’s got a lot of passion, (and) it’s got a lot of forward thinkers and innovative thinkers. That makes it the perfect place to be the center of the energy transformation really in the world.”

Andre Guichard, co-owner of Gallery Guichard with his wife Frances, is delighted to have the microgrid in his community.

“My take as a Bronzeville resident and a Bronzeville business owner is no matter what community you live in, you want to live in a modern community,” Andre Guichard said. “And I think the grid represents state-of-art technology as it relates to power and power failures. In laymen’s terms, to me it means when there are power failures, the whole city doesn’t have to suffer and you can deal with these problems in sections.”


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Frances Guichard said that the reliability the microgrid brings is of huge benefit to the Bronzeville business community.

“For businesses, it’s imperative to have something that allows us to continue to operate should the power go down,” Frances Guichard said. “And this allows us to continue to operate when we have storms or inclement weather where we need to make sure our businesses are still functioning.”

The Bronzeville Community Microgrid is powered by rooftop- and ground-mounted solar installations at the CHA’s Dearborn Homes. Large batteries in the community then store that power.

Natural gas-fired generation is also available to ensure continuous power to the community in the event of a major grid interruption, according to ComEd.

Player said the microgrid has the capacity to provide energy to the entire community in the event of a disruption to the main grid.

“Every single one of the thousands of residents, the police station, the fire station, the schools and all the small businesses here in Bronzeville would still remain with power,” Player said.

As part of the community microgrid, the CHA in partnership with ComEd has installed solar panels across the Dearborn Homes campus, according to Ellen Sargent, deputy chief for building operations at the CHA.

“We typically use across the campus about 6 million kilowatt hours annually,” Sargent said. “The solar panels are supplementing that energy by about 10%, which means that we’re generating about 600,000 kilowatt hours annually through the solar panels that we in turn do not have to buy from ComEd.”

CHA CEO Tracey Scott is passionate about utilizing green energy technology to reduce energy usage and the housing agency’s carbon footprint, but also to address issues of equity.

“We’ve been working on this project for almost 10 years with the community,” Scott said. “When you look at our communities that have been disinvested and when we talk about environmental justice, it’s really important that clean energy is something that CHA is always pursuing.”

As part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Climate Challenge, the CHA has committed to reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2033.

“We’re well on track, having reduced it just in one year by 5%,” Scott said. “But also it has provided opportunities for new jobs. Through this program we had four residents who went through training on solar installations who are now certified in an industry that is only going to grow. So we see this as an opportunity both for today but also for the future.”

And in 2025, ComEd hopes to achieve a world first by connecting the Illinois Institute of Technology microgrid to the Bronzeville microgrid in a so-called microgrid cluster.

“When you get microgrids in a close geographic location,” Player said, “we have the concept of clustering those microgrids, which makes them even stronger and more resilient. This is a new concept. This has not been done yet in the world, and we are going to be the first.”


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