The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) on Jan. 15 announced $30 million for projects “to drive advancements in the resiliency, efficiency, and adaptability of America’s power grid.”
The Grid Reliability with Automatic Damping and Inertia for Electrical Networks and Transmission Systems (GRADIENTS) program aims to develop control and coordination technologies that better empower system operators to respond during dynamic interactions without prohibitive capital expenses.
“GRADIENTS technologies will help incorporate a variety of generation sources and stabilize the grid to prevent cascading failures that can lead to dangerous and costly blackouts,” said ARPA-E Director Evelyn N. Wang. “Projects will combine hardware and software solutions to enable better grid coordination, protection, and real-time control, resulting in a more reliable, more resilient American energy landscape.”
GRADIENTS "will develop disruptive solutions that address and coordinate resources that can provide inertia (energy) and damping (control) with fast frequency regulation across the grid. These technologies will improve reliability in high-intermittent penetration scenarios, mitigating blackout risks, reducing potential curtailment of intermittent energy sources, lowering operational costs, and maximizing economic viability."
Solutions envisioned include advanced power electronics controls, intelligent relays with fast and coordinated response under emergency situations, wide-area real-time control solutions, and optimization algorithms for dynamic balancing of energy consumption and production. "New technologies will also offer scalable and flexible approaches to distributed control, supporting a wide range of applications from large regional grids to localized microgrids."
GRADIENTS joins other programs like DC-GRIDS and ULTRAFAST in the agency’s portfolio of grid-related efforts to improve and modernize the nation’s grid infrastructure.
Visit the ARPA-E eXCHANGE website for more information about GRADIENTS, including key guidelines, and read the program description.
ARPA-E is the disruption wing of the DOE that funds and directs the discovery of outlier energy technologies that are strategic to America's energy security.