Energy Department taps Penn State researchers to help modernize U.S. power grid
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Penn State announced Thursday it is one of 10 universities selected nationwide to work on a project for the U.S. Department of Energy to modernize the nation’s power grid.
The Penn State team of researchers chosen for the department’s Grid Optimization Competition’s first challenge is led by Uday V. Shanbhag, professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.
“As the United States begins incorporating more renewable energy sources, there are some new and unique challenges that today’s infrastructure simply can’t handle,” Shanbhag said in a statement released Friday.
DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy is heading up the project challenging researchers from universities and national laboratories to solve the fundamental issues facing the electricity infrastructure, while addressing the concerns that widespread renewable energy sources will introduce in the future.
“With a network as large as the U.S. power grid, the optimization problems we need to solve are incredibly large and complex,” Shanbhag said.
Not only does every power generation facility — including wind, solar, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric sources — need to route their energy in a responsive, cost-conserving way, there are also an enormous number of contingencies that arise.
With the first round of funding, the teams are being challenged to design algorithms that find ways to provide electricity more quickly, efficiently, safely and reliably within the current grid.
“Providing for every contingency possible in a network like this, serving more than 65 million nodes, it’s a large and nasty problem,” Shanbhag said. “And it is one that has to be solved every 10 minutes.”
Mary Ann Thomas is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Mary Ann at 724-226-4691, mthomas@tribweb.com or via Twitter @MaThomas_Trib.