The Ohio State University joined a new $2.44 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to help utilities and wholesale electricity markets improve efficiency and reliability while reducing emissions and costs.
The Duke University-led initiative comes at a time of needed transformations to tackle climate change. The DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) accepted the team’s proposal, “A Grid that’s Risk-Aware for Clean Electricity (GRACE),”which taps the expertise of researchers from academia, industry and government.
Ohio State Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Antonio Conejo said his team's role involves work in design.
“Our contributions pertain to two research and development areas, modeling of power systems and developing optimization tools for decision making in these systems," he said.
Conejo is a professor in ECE and Integrated Systems Engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow and an affiliated faculty member of the Sustainability Institute.
Dalia Patiño-Echeverri, Gendell Family Associate Professor of Energy Systems and Public Policy at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, is leading the three-year project.
“Our goal is to make a meaningful and tangible contribution to the transformation of the U.S. electricity sector into a cleaner and more efficient system,” she said
The GRACE team will design an energy system management (EMS) framework enabling U.S. electricity providers to better anticipate and manage uncertainty in the performance of conventional and renewable power generators in their systems. This will help improve the short-term operational efficiency systemwide and guarantee its reliability at the lowest possible environmental and economic cost.
“Operating under conditions of uncertainty places burdens on any business or enterprise. For electricity system operators, these burdens are compounded by a changing climate, uncertain demand and variable and unpredictable performance of conventional and renewable power generators,” Patiño-Echeverri said.
To help relieve some of these burdens, the GRACE framework will use specially developed algorithms allowing energy managers to characterize risk for assets within their systems – for instance, how and when weather conditions might affect solar or wind power generation, or when short-term spikes in consumer demand might require redirecting available power supplies, tapping reserves or bringing new resources on line.
The framework will reportedly be ready for integration into industry practice by summer 2023.