New State-of-the-Art Center for Grid Operations Research

I recently toured a new facility that could be an important training and research asset for utilities and transmission operators all over the country. Washington State-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has created a facility designed to research ways to "move grid operations from minutes to seconds" in the words of Rob Pratt, who heads up the laboratory's Electricity Infrastructure Operations Initiative and its new Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center (EIOC).

Pratt is referring to the need to transform the way the grid is monitored and controlled. Today, most utilities have no way of knowing what is happening in neighboring systems, thus no way to know if problems are headed their way. And even inside their own service territories, they are often operating with information that is 5 to 20 minutes old.

The EIOC is a state-of-the-art facility to develop and test new concepts. On the surface, it looks like an ordinary control room with computer screens and a large video wall. But it has several unique advantages as a research and training tool.

     1)     A fully capable control center with live data from actual grid operations around

     the country

     2)     State-of-the-art grid operation and modeling tools provided by AREVA T&D

     3)     Access to Department of Energy supercomputers and high-speed networks.

Couple that with PNNL's staff of grid experts and you have a powerful package for perfecting next-generation tools and techniques. As a designated "user-facility" it will be eligible for use by qualified utilities, transmission operators and university research programs. In other words, the EIOC will conduct training for, transfer technology to, and work in partnership with power system operators and researchers around the country.

Potential uses

Because it has live, real-world data hooked up to powerful computers, the EIOC is a great place to model the current grid. It is also ideal for testing new algorithms, new interfaces and new visualization concepts. Here are a few of the ways the EIOC could be valuable.

·         Operator training and simulation. You might think of this capability as the grid equivalent of the simulators used to train pilots. The EIOC even has the ability to fake problems and failures to test operators' ability to think on their feet.

·         R&D for new control and operations technologies. The EIOC already collects information from the western grid and the eastern interconnection phasor project, allowing it to test new ideas against real-world data.

·         Market operations research. As the world (ever so gradually) moves to liberalized markets, it needs new and better ways to balance wholesale markets, integrate demand response and relieve transmission congestion. The EIOC is already conducting one market test. It hopes to contribute to modernizing not just grid operations but market operations as well.

·         Interface and visualization research. The industry urgently needs better ways to handle massive amounts of data, convert it to actionable information, and display it so problems can be instantly and easily recognized.

·         Backup control centers. With new reliability regulations on the way from NERC, the EIOC may be useful as an emergency backup control center for certain utilities or transmission operators.

We simply can't manage the 21st-century grid with 20th-century tools. And yet the country has few facilities dedicated to new techniques. Facilities such as the EIOC will be invaluable to that effort.

   PNNL article on the Electricity Infrastructure Operations Initiative

   Email PNNL's Rob Pratt