GRID DATA Highlights

Severe weather, cyber intrusions, and physical attacks can damage America’s critical energy infrastructure and cause power outages that affect families and businesses alike. This transformation is driving ARPA‑E to support promising early-stage energy technologies that could make the U.S. electric grid more reliable, flexible, and resilient.

When Hurricane Maria struck the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico last September, it took the entire island’s power grid with it. Today, over 95 percent of the island has its power restored, but the rebuilding process is far from finished. Over the long term, many challenges remain — along with some big opportunities to make the grid smarter and more resilient.

ARPA-E recently announced it is making funding available for a new program. The Generating Realistic Information for Development of Distribution And Transmission Algorithms (GRID DATA) program seeks to fund the development of large-scale, realistic, validated, and open-access electric power system network models (transmission and distribution) that have the detail required for the successful development and testing of transformational power system optimization and control algorithms. The program will also fund the creation of an open-access, self-sustaining repository for the storage, annotation, and curation of these power system models, as well as others generated by the community.

This workshop discussed the challenges and opportunities associated with development of new power system optimization tools in the context of cost effectively facilitating the integration of high penetrations of renewable generation.

The Energy Department’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) today announced $11 million in funding for seven transformational projects that will develop realistic, open-access models and data repositories to aid in improving the U.S. electric grid.

The aging U.S. electric grid is comprised of more than 300,000 miles of electric transmission lines that take electricity from power plants to transformers and finally, into homes and businesses. More than 30% of the electric grid's transmission lines, transformers and other hardware are approaching or past the end of their life cycle. About 10% of electricity produced in U.S. power plants never reaches potential users because it’s lost during transmission, and power outages and blackouts. This loss of energy costs businesses and consumers nearly $80 billion dollars a year.