As a cornerstone of one of the youngest, largest, and most prestigious planned communities in the country (the City of Irvine), UCI was established on sprawling undeveloped acreage on the bluffs bounding the Pacific Ocean. This allowed the campus to be methodically and systematically designed from scratch with a large, circular central park encircled by a one‐mile underground utility tunnel loop connected to central energy and information infrastructure. The UCI Campus microgrid was integral to this modern design along with a modern district heating and cooling system. Today, the UCI Microgrid serves a community of more than 30,000 people and encompasses a wide array of building types (residential, office, research, classroom), transportation options (automobiles, buses, shared‐cars, bicycles), and a wide array of distributed energy resources. Through an array of prior and current research programs, the UCI Advanced Power and Energy Program (APEP) has teamed and worked with the UCI Administration and Facilities Management (FM) to integrate key microgrid hardware, software, and simulation assets into the UCI Campus microgrid.
