The New York Power Authority and Tennessee public power utilities CDE Lightband and EPB have earned the American Public Power Association’s 2024 Energy Innovator Award.
Each year, APPA’s research program, the Demonstration of Energy & Efficiency Developments program, recognizes innovative utility projects with this award.
Details on Awardee Projects
Here are details on projects developed by the awardees and recognized through the Energy Innovator Award.
EPB
EPB’s Power to Protect uses a combined solar generation and battery storage model to preserve essential law enforcement and safety functions at the Chattanooga Police Services Center and Fire Department administrative headquarters. The location houses critical regional emergency response services that operate 24/7/365 and depend on reliable energy, including SWAT team, homicide, Chattanooga Fire Station 10, radio control center, city camera surveillance, and other critical communication infrastructure.
The project is a joint effort of EPB and the City of Chattanooga that includes:
- Generation: The city purchased a 200-kilowatt diesel generator and 155 kilowatts of solar panels installed on the building roof "behind the meter." The solar array reduces the amount of energy consumed at the location, lowering its monthly bill by roughly 20%.
- Storage: EPB purchased a 500 kW/1,000 kWh battery to support the microgrid and other grid services; the battery is installed "in front of the meter" to shave peak load during extremely hot or cold weather, reducing TVA's wholesale peak demand charge to EPB and minimizing power costs for local residents and businesses. (EPB does not shave peak load if severe weather is in the forecast; batteries are charged to capacity so they are prepared for an emergency.)
If EPB's smart grid becomes unavailable and the automated restoration cannot resolve the outage, EPB system operators will remotely transition the site to use the microgrid for energy, also called island mode. Once the site is in island mode, a microgrid controller autonomously balances energy requirements.
The battery (fully charged within two hours) establishes frequency and voltage (grid forming mode) for the microgrid.
Depending on the time of day and season, the battery will either support the full load of the site or supplement what the solar array cannot. If solar output is greater than the site's energy needs, the battery will store the excess. The generator is used only when the solar and energy storage assets can not meet the total demand of the islanded microgrid.
During normal operations, the police and fire microgrid battery operates in grid-following mode, meaning it is connected to EPB's Smart Grid, which keeps the battery fully charged and ready when needed. In a test situation, it takes three minutes to restore power using the microgrid; this time will vary depending on several factors during an emergency.
EPB's Smart Grid provides two pathways for power to reach the Chattanooga Police Services Center and Fire Department administrative headquarters, so the new microgrid will serve as the third line of defense should widespread outages affect Chattanooga.
To ensure comprehensive power resiliency, EPB also relocated a power pole from the front to the back of the building to avoid damage from possible wrecks in the future on the busy Amnicola Highway corridor.
NYPA
NYPA worked with Prisma Photonics, a Tel Aviv-based company that offers power grid monitoring and preventive solutions that use a specific type of fiber-optic sensing — called Hyper-Scan Fiber-Sensing -- based on the principles of distributed acoustic sensing.
This technology identifies power line conditions in real time, detecting potential threats to the system, including weather conditions, electrical faults and even sabotage by human activity in proximity to towers.
Prisma Photonics was selected as the winner of the 2021 NYPA and Israel Smart Energy Challenge, a competitive award with a value of $1 million to enable New York State to partner with an Israeli company to develop an innovative energy technology to help New York State advance its clean energy agenda.
Beginning in the winter of 2021, NYPA embarked on a project with Prisma Photonics to use its PrismaPower technology to monitor the transmission line from a substation in Gilboa, New York, to another substation in Fraser, New York, climbing the Catskill Mountains for more than 35 miles. Due to its position, this line experiences a wide range of weather conditions, including especially harsh winters with very cold temperatures, significant snowfall and powerful winds.
This initiative provided NYPA with a tool to identify specific problems before they become serious and enables it to plan preventive maintenance, improving both grid reliability and resilience, NYPA noted.
To this end, PrismaPower can identify a power line's health at granular levels, including in weather-related conditions such as line galloping, sagging and high winds. It also identifies potentially catastrophic events, including flashovers, short circuits, partial discharges, vegetation strikes, and even tower climbing and vandalism.
Perhaps most importantly, this technology does not require adding extra sensors to the transmission infrastructure or any amplification or power sources along the fiber, NYPA said.
For nearly two years, Prisma Photonics collected data in the Upstate New York region over rugged mountains, through thick forests, and in the most extreme heat and cold. This data collection has allowed for deep comparative analysis, making it possible to see the effects that different weather conditions have on the grid.
From a preventive maintenance perspective, long-term analysis was performed to locate and create a threshold mechanism to identify high partial-discharge levels in specific towers. Towers with high partial-discharge levels can be treated separately before the matter becomes more serious (for example, by insulator washing or replacements). In the future, this analysis can help with optimizing maintenance by handling the needed towers.
Perhaps most important to NYPA's efforts to deliver reliable service in areas of New York that get extremely cold is Prisma Photonics' ability to detect icing on line spans. Data captured directly from the lines through fiber sensing was correlated with weather information.
When cable tension in a specific span is high along with the right weather conditions (for instance, low temperatures and high precipitation), this is a good indicator of icing. In an icing dashboard, spans with suspected high icing loads are presented on a map and, by picking them, tower data can be seen. Having real-time notification of icing alerts enables NYPA to act and correct the situation before any damage is done to the asset.
CDE Lightband
CDE has developed a comprehensive, three phase project which will improve CDE's ability to dynamically respond to disruptive events affecting some of the most disadvantaged communities in Northern Tennessee.
The project leverages an innovative and data-driven approach to identify 29 adjacent electric distribution circuits with higher than system average outage frequencies and durations.
In the past five years, circuits in the project area were damaged by three separate storms which lead to federal disaster declarations. The average annual Circuit SAIDI and SAIFI values (not excluding major events) for the 29 identified circuits over this 5-year period were 718 and 2.2 respectively.
Excluding the project circuits, this compares to system wide average per circuit SAIDI and SAIFI values of 451 and 1.9 respectively.
One of the key innovations of this project design is the use of vehicle location data to pinpoint instances of powerline damage. This data can provide precise locations of faults and other system damage.
CDE Lightband has heat mapped this data and overplayed atop other system information and social vulnerability information to identify the most vulnerable areas for distribution automation, power line undergrounding, and other distribution system enhancements.
After all FLISR distribution automation components of the Project have been completed, CDE will install a 4-megawatt (MW), 16-megawatt-hour (MWh) lithium-ion battery, strategically located near the ends of two isolated circuits.
This battery location was identified because the directly interconnected circuits have fewer options for back feeding from other circuits due to geography. This battery will be sufficiently sized to serve the loads of these circuits under normal loads during outage conditions when it may not be possible to back feed these circuits from other circuits on the distribution system.
In combination with the distribution system automation components of the Project, the battery will allow CDE to reduce load on the interconnected substation in order to free up capacity for back feeding from that substation to other Project circuits.
The energy storage component of this project has been carefully integrated into the larger Project design to maximize the value of both the battery and the reclosers. The combination of the battery and recloser elements of this project will create a dynamic and highly adaptable distribution system to serve some of the most disadvantaged communities in Northern Tennessee.
The overall project design has been adopted as a long-term CDE Lightband distribution automation and system enhancement strategy intended to improve resiliency in the most vulnerable areas of the system and for the most vulnerable communities using a data-driven and strategic methodology.
The project team included Jared Combs, Chris Williams, Brian Taylor, Keith Cutshall, Haily Hinson, and Jim Manning.
