Suburban Birmingham
Jim Leverette is Senior Research Engineer at Southern Company.
With the support of the Dentons Smart Cities & Communities Think Tank, PUF chose to honor Austin, Columbus, San Antonio, Spokane and suburban Birmingham as the Fortnightly Smartest Communities 2019.
PUF: What's your job?
Jim Leverette: I'm a research engineer at Southern Company. I'm in the end user group setting. That means I focus on everything behind the customer meter. How those new technologies on the customer side of the meter impact the power grid, and how that may change the way we interact with our customer in the future.
PUF: Alabama Power and Signature Homes built this smart neighborhood of 62 homes in Hoover. What's unique about it?
Jim Leverette: This is one of the best and largest projects that we've done in recent memory from our side of the research team. It's been great for me because, not only am I looking at the information from behind the customer meter, but I'm also working closely with our teams that focus on distribution and generation, as we have a small microgrid in this facility.
Risk makes this project unique. It's not any one of the individual things we're doing, but it's the scale of the project, and it's the integration of so many different aspects into one project that's letting us see what's new and different here.