• Login
    • Join
  • FOLLOW:
  • Subscribe Free
    • Magazine
    • eNewsletter
    Checkout
    • Magazine
    • News
    • Printed Electronics
    • Raw Materials
    • Equipment
    • Services
    • Suppliers Guide
    • Resources
    • More
  • Magazine
  • News
  • Printed Electronics
  • Raw Materials
  • Equipment
  • Services
  • Suppliers Guide
  • Resources
  • Current & Past Issues
    Features
    Editorials
    Digital Edition
    Subscribe Now
    Advertise Now
    eNewsletter Archive
    Our Team
    Editorial Guidelines
    Breaking News
    Experts Opinion
    Financial News
    Manufacturers News
    Mergers and Acquisitions
    Online Exclusives
    Personnel
    Product Releases
    Suppliers News
    Live From Shows
    Displays and Lighting
    Photovoltaics
    Printed Batteries
    Printed Circuit Boards/Membrane Switches/In Mold Electronics
    Flexible and Printed Electronics
    RFID and NFC
    Sensors and Wearables
    Smart Cards and Packaging
    Touch Screens
    Adhesives, Barriers and Encapsulants
    Chemicals, Metals and Powders
    Conductive Inks and Coatings
    Electronic Materials
    Film, Paper, Glass and Substrates
    Graphene, Perovskites and Carbon Nanotubes
    Nanomaterials
    Printed Electronic Components
    Research Reports
    Semiconductors and Quantum Dots
    Energy Curing Equipment
    Lab and Testing Equipment
    Manufacturing Equipment
    Printing Equipment
    3D Printing
    Contract Manufacturing Services
    Product Design and Testing
    Research and Consulting
    Research Institutions
    Research Reports
    Universities
    Equipment
    All Companies
    Materials
    Categories
    Converting
    Printed Electronics Systems
    Associations
    Research and Services
    Used Machinery
    Add New Company
    Industry Events
    Live from show events
    Podcasts
    Videos
    Blogs
    Slideshows
    Infographics
    Webinars
    Whitepapers
    Equipment and Services
    Glossary
    • Magazine
      • Current & Past Issues
      • Features
      • Editorial
      • Columns
      • Digital Edition
      • eNewsletter Archive
      • Editorial Guidelines
      • Subscribe Now
      • Advertise Now
    • Breaking News
    • Suppliers Guide
      • Suppliers Guide
      • Add Your Company
    • Printed Electronics
      • Photovoltaics
      • Printed Batteries
      • Printed Circuit Boards/Membrane Switches/In Mold Electronics
      • Flexible and Printed Electronics
      • RFID and NFC
      • Sensors and Wearables
      • Smart Cards and Packaging
      • Touch Screens
    • Raw Materials
      • Adhesives, Barriers and Encapsulants
      • Chemicals, Metals and Powders
      • Conductive Inks and Coatings
      • Electronic Materials
      • Film, Paper, Glass and Substrates
      • Graphene, Perovskites and Carbon Nanotubes
      • Nanomaterials
      • Semiconductors and Quantum Dots
    • Equipment
      • Energy Curing Equipment
      • Lab and Testing Equipment
      • Manufacturing Equipment
      • Printing Equipment
      • 3D Printing
    • Services
      • Contract Manufacturing Services
      • Product Design and Testing
      • Research and Consulting
      • Research Institutions
      • Research Reports
      • Universities
    • Online Exclusives
    • Slideshows
    • Blog
    • Videos
    • Podcasts
    • Infographics
    • Events
      • Industry Events
      • Live from show events
      • Webinars
    • About Us
      • About Us
      • Contact Us
      • Advertise With Us
      • Privacy Policy
      • Terms of Use
    Breaking News

    Modeling, Monitoring, Microgrids: ORNL Provides Help as Puerto Rico Rebuilds

    Researchers at ORNL, other DOE national laboratories were commissioned to evaluate and analyze options, offer tools.

    Related CONTENT
    • Three ORNL Researchers Named American Physical Society Fellows
    • NREL Interns Energize the Laboratory
    • NREL’s Eric Payne Wins Technology Transfer Professional of the Year Award
    • Energy Secretary Perry Digs into Research at NREL
    • NREL Acquires Powerful New High-Performance Computing System
    11.09.18
    As Puerto Rico works to restore and modernize its power grid after last year’s devastating hurricane season, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have stepped up to provide unique analysis, sensing and modeling tools to better inform decisions.

    The Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity has been working to help the island evaluate damage and identify opportunities to make the power grid more resilient to future disruption. The office issued a report in June, “Energy Resilience Solutions for the Puerto Rico Grid,” detailing recommendations to fortify infrastructure on the island.

    Researchers at ORNL and other DOE national laboratories were commissioned by the Office of Electricity to evaluate and analyze options and to offer tools as the effort proceeds. ORNL is working with other labs including Argonne National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories on simulations of the Puerto Rico transmission and distribution system for better planning, to assess interdependencies such as fuel availability and power generation options, on evaluating the use of distribution generation such as microgrids, and lastly, on sensor deployment for improved situational awareness.

    ORNL scientists and engineers immediately set to work constructing a model of the Puerto Rico grid as part of the project. Unique to the work was the creation of a planning model that automatically populates protective relay schemes to safeguard the flow of electricity. ORNL also is deploying state-of-the-art sensors on the island to monitor the grid state and validate the model’s accuracy.

    The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) now has at its disposal an ORNL-developed Dynamic Protection-Planning Model that can be used to predict the dynamic behavior of the electrical system in the event of severe weather or other impacts.




    “The tool can take the projected path of a hurricane and immediately provide predictive analysis of how transmission equipment could be impacted,” said Nils Stenvig of ORNL’s Power and Energy Systems Group. Such information can be crucial for planning and recovery efforts.

    The tool is a first for the power industry, as it combines system planning models that utilities use to predict system behavior with detailed information about protective relay hardware. Protective relays control circuit breakers that isolate system disturbances and prevent their propagation—such as when a tree falls on a power line and triggers what operators call a fault.

    The resulting simulation provides a more realistic, complete, and accurate analysis of system events. The tool provides insight into protective relaying schemes and could yield suggestions for the siting of strategic infrastructure so that outages are minimized and do not cascade system-wide.

    For a power grid facing an immediate threat, the tool could support tasks such as predictive islanding: proactively isolating portions of the grid expected to be hit the hardest to keep as much of the system running as possible during a weather event, Stenvig said.

    Travis Smith, a protection system engineer with years of utility experience who now works in the PES Group at ORNL, previously developed advanced modeling tools for DOE that take into account protective relays and has expanded them for the Puerto Rico project.

    “Protection engineers know how to calibrate relays individually, but this tool gives them a way to analyze and coordinate the entire system and make improvements,” Smith said. “This is a real roadmap utility can use to modernize their system.”

    Today’s protection settings are sometimes based on old models and are not optimized for the current state of the system. The urgent phase of this work was to help PREPA analyze these protection systems, which can have an immediate impact on how the system responds to future disruptions, 

    Another modeling tool being developed for Puerto Rico will analyze locations where new power generation can be sited and cost-effectively integrated into the grid.

    “This tool would tell you how much power you can inject into the system at different points without having to perform expensive upgrades. Sometimes those transmission system upgrades can end up costing more than the new generation itself,” Stenvig said.

    ORNL’s computational scientists are also evaluating locations on the island where equipment such as spare generators and transformers could be strategically placed for easy, secure access after a natural disaster.

    To help visualize the grid in Puerto Rico and validate modeling work, ORNL researchers are in the process of deploying 20 GridEye sensors that constantly monitor and report on the island’s grid state.
    These low-cost, easily installed sensors are plugged into standard 120-volt outlets and record real-time data on electrical disturbances using a patented triangulation algorithm . GridEye sensors, developed by the University of Tennessee/ORNL Governor’s Chair scientist Yilu Liu, have already been deployed at hundreds of locations across the continental United States to provide wide-area situational awareness of the grid.

    The sensors are being located inside utility substations, universities, and commercial buildings in Puerto Rico. They are connected to the internet and synchronized with each other via a global positioning system to provide voltage, frequency , and other measurements, and to give essential accuracy to researchers’ models.

    The sensors “provide time-synchronized data on changes such as demand load fluctuations and generator drops at a much higher resolution than was possible previously on the utility system,” Liu said. “This is critical for model validation. It tells you how good the simulation is if you can compare it with real measurements.” 
     
    The next phase of the work could involve the development of a tool that takes the GridEye data and provides automatic alerts to PREPA of any major system changes.

    ORNL is working in another area aimed at the island’s economic vitality by analyzing potential investments in microgrids for commercial and industrial customers.

    Made up of locally sited power generation and energy storage, microgrids have become increasingly popular to diversify a utility’s generation mix in terms of fuels and geography. The systems can provide power reliability to communities where they’re sited, and can even help stabilize the larger grid. ORNL has conducted extensive research on microgrid communications and controls to maximize the performance of these systems.

    In work for Puerto Rico’s economic development authority, ORNL researchers are working with collaborators at Sandia to provide technical analysis of proposed microgrid projects for industrial corridors. This includes analysis and selection of sites around the island where industrial properties could most benefit from microgrids. Researchers take into account fuel availability, cost and reliability constraints, local geography, existing power infrastructure, and industrial tenants.

    “Microgrids would make a real impact on businesses across the island,” Stenvig said. “They could potentially supply power to surrounding neighborhoods as well.” 
     
    He noted that after last fall’s hurricanes, some of the island’s business owners in rural areas turned themselves into humanitarian depots—helping distribute clean drinking water and providing shower facilities to local residents, for instance.

    As the work in these areas moves forward, the researchers continue to get feedback from the utility and economic development authority in order to improve the tools.

    The capabilities being developed to improve energy systems in the island territory could provide a platform for grid improvements industry-wide in the future, the researchers noted.

    Smith, for instance, is developing concepts for a “smart relay”—protective hardware that would have processing capability embedded so that it could communicate with other hardware and with a utility’s control system to automatically change relay settings as system conditions evolve. “Right now those settings are pretty much static,” Smith said. “Sort of a set-it-and-forget-it scenario in some cases. This kind of work could end up being the future of protective relays at a time when the country is very focused on grid resilience and security.”

    The research “fits into everything we do here at ORNL in terms of materials science, sensing, electronics, simulation, high-performance computing, and cyber-physical security,” Smith added.

    ORNL researchers are also conceiving ideas to harden the grid physically with potential designs for a more flexible system of utility poles, for instance, that could bend rather than break in high winds or could be safely collapsed ahead of a storm and then unfolded afterward to protect power lines. The lab’s expertise and capabilities in additive manufacturing could be leveraged to more quickly design and produce these improvements.
     
    Related Searches
    • sensor
    • ornl
    • electronics
    • oak ridge national laboratory
    Suggested For You
    Three ORNL Researchers Named American Physical Society Fellows Three ORNL Researchers Named American Physical Society Fellows
    NREL Interns Energize the Laboratory NREL Interns Energize the Laboratory
    NREL’s Eric Payne Wins Technology Transfer Professional of the Year Award NREL’s Eric Payne Wins Technology Transfer Professional of the Year Award
    Energy Secretary Perry Digs into Research at NREL Energy Secretary Perry Digs into Research at NREL
    NREL Acquires Powerful New High-Performance Computing System NREL Acquires Powerful New High-Performance Computing System
    Research Center to Explore New Class of Semiconductor Research Center to Explore New Class of Semiconductor
    ORNL’s Kimberly Jeskie, Michelle Kidder Named ACS Fellows ORNL’s Kimberly Jeskie, Michelle Kidder Named ACS Fellows
    Brixon, Inc. Licenses ORNL’s Sensor Technology for Security Applications Brixon, Inc. Licenses ORNL’s Sensor Technology for Security Applications
    TE Connectivity Launches High Current Connectors for Harsh Outdoor Environments TE Connectivity Launches High Current Connectors for Harsh Outdoor Environments
    ORNL’s Summit Supercomputer Named World’s Fastest ORNL’s Summit Supercomputer Named World’s Fastest
    NREL, DOE, and U.S. Automakers Join to Transform Mobility Future NREL, DOE, and U.S. Automakers Join to Transform Mobility Future
    NREL Announces Participants for 2018 Executive Energy Leadership Program NREL Announces Participants for 2018 Executive Energy Leadership Program
    ORNL Launches Summit Supercomputer ORNL Launches Summit Supercomputer
    ORNL’s Panos Datskos Elected Fellow of SPIE ORNL’s Panos Datskos Elected Fellow of SPIE

    Related Breaking News

    • Breaking News | Personnel | Photovoltaics | Research Institutions

      Three ORNL Researchers Named American Physical Society Fellows

      Gaute Hagen, Masaaki Matsuda and Parans Paranthaman have been honored by the American Physical Society.
      10.26.18

    • Breaking News | Personnel | Photovoltaics | Research Institutions
      NREL Interns Energize the Laboratory

      NREL Interns Energize the Laboratory

      Includes 58 SULIs, 77 RPP undergraduate interns, 96 RPP graduate interns, and four community college interns. Alyssa Boll tes
      09.10.18

    • Breaking News | Personnel | Research Institutions

      NREL’s Eric Payne Wins Technology Transfer Professional of the Year Award

      From 2012 to 2018, the NREL saw a 68% increase in invention submissions.
      08.29.18


    • Breaking News | Graphene, Perovskites and Carbon Nanotubes | Photovoltaics | Research Institutions
      Energy Secretary Perry Digs into Research at NREL

      Energy Secretary Perry Digs into Research at NREL

      Emphasizes importance of partnerships between national labs, universities and industry.
      Wayne Hicks 08.16.18

    • Breaking News | Research Institutions
      NREL Acquires Powerful New High-Performance Computing System

      NREL Acquires Powerful New High-Performance Computing System

      Eagle will be 3.5 times more powerful than current system dedicated to energy research.
      08.16.18

    Trending
    • EMagin Receives Coveted Display Week Award, Looks Ahead To Future
    • Jabil Teams With SolarEdge To Advance Smart Energy Technology
    • HID Global Acquires RFID Producer ACURA
    • JDI Further Develops Its Transparent Rælclear Display Technology
    • Ams OSRAM Heads To Sensors Converge 2022
    Breaking News
    • Weekly Recap: eMagin, Applied Materials, and Schott Top This Week’s Stories
    • NREL Names Jennifer Logan to Leadership Team as CFO
    • National Grid Renewables Orders 2 GW of First Solar Modules
    • EO System Company Ltd. Picks eMagin’s OLED Microdisplays for Global Projects
    • Jabil Teams with SolarEdge to Advance Smart Energy Technology
    View Breaking News >
    CURRENT ISSUE

    Winter 2021

    • Printed Electronics Now’s International Suppliers’ Directory
    • The Automotive Market and Flexible and Printed Electronics
    • Flexible and Printed Electronics in Healthcare
    • Flexible and Printed Electronics Make Gains in Smart Packaging
    • PAPERONICS: Low-cost multisensory paper and packaging applications
    • View More >

    Cookies help us to provide you with an excellent service. By using our website, you declare yourself in agreement with our use of cookies.
    You can obtain detailed information about the use of cookies on our website by clicking on "More information”.

    • About Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms And Conditions
    • Contact Us

    follow us

    Subscribe
    Nutraceuticals World

    Latest Breaking News From Nutraceuticals World

    Florida Food Products Acquires Javo
    Roquette Launches Nutralys Rice Protein
    New IADSA Chair Lauds Explorations of Supplementation in Healthcare Policy
    Coatings World

    Latest Breaking News From Coatings World

    The Southern Society for Coatings Technology's 84th Annual Technical Conference A Success
    PPG to Showcase Specialty Automotive, Aerospace Adhesives, Sealants at Adhesives & Bonding Expo
    PPG’s New Paint for a New Start Initiative to Transform 25-plus Schools Worldwide
    Medical Product Outsourcing

    Latest Breaking News From Medical Product Outsourcing

    MPO's Most Read Stories This Week—June 25
    Magnetic Insight Announces $17 Million in Series B Funding
    BreatheSuite Adds Brad Fluegel to its Board
    Contract Pharma

    Latest Breaking News From Contract Pharma

    Pierre Fabre and Lonza Enter Manufacturing Agreement
    MasterControl and Elemental Machines Form Biomanufacturing Partnership
    Qosina Strengthens Aseptic Capabilities
    Beauty Packaging

    Latest Breaking News From Beauty Packaging

    Benefit Exec Joins Madison Reed's Board
    Peroni & Ellis Brooklyn Launch Fragrance Collection Inspired by Italian Spritz Cocktails
    Rhode Is Trending for June, Trendalytics Says
    Happi

    Latest Breaking News From Happi

    Wonder Curl Wins GlossWire's GlossPitch Competition
    Anti-aging Skincare Brand Vitabrid C12 Launches Bestsellers on Amazon
    Botanical Embedded Candles Can Be Fire Hazard, Says National Candle Association
    Ink World

    Latest Breaking News From Ink World

    Weekly Recap: INX’s VC Fund, Screen Industry and Ball Top This Week’s News
    British Coatings Federation Posts Online History
    Orion Announces Price Increases, Reduced Payment Terms
    Label & Narrow Web

    Latest Breaking News From Label & Narrow Web

    PCMC teams with IGT, Fujifilm makes big announcement and more
    Loftware recognized as 'AIDC Company of the Year'
    Schreiner MediPharm highlights sustainability of Needle-Trap technology
    Nonwovens Industry

    Latest Breaking News From Nonwovens Industry

    Tranzonic Names VP of Supply Chain
    Ontex Climate Action Targets Approved by Science-Based Targets Initiative
    Suominen Test Center Assesses Biodegradability of Nonwovens
    Orthopedic Design & Technology

    Latest Breaking News From Orthopedic Design & Technology

    ODT's Most-Read Stories This Week—June 25
    3Spine Inc. Receives IDE Approval for U.S. Pivotal Clinical Trial
    Volume-Based Procurement to Reduce Chinese Orthopedic Market Value
    Printed Electronics Now

    Latest Breaking News From Printed Electronics Now

    Weekly Recap: eMagin, Applied Materials, and Schott Top This Week’s Stories
    NREL Names Jennifer Logan to Leadership Team as CFO
    National Grid Renewables Orders 2 GW of First Solar Modules

    Copyright © 2022 Rodman Media. All rights reserved. Use of this constitutes acceptance of our privacy policy The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Rodman Media.

    AD BLOCKER DETECTED

    Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors.
    Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.


    FREE SUBSCRIPTION Already a subscriber? Login