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Building a Resilient Electric Grid to Prevent Outages from Extreme Weather Events

Building a Resilient Electric Grid to Prevent Outages from Extreme Weather Events

Created: Tuesday, December 7, 2021 - 13:06
Categories:
General Security and Resilience

As the nation’s infrastructure continues to age along with climate change leading to more frequent extreme weather events, the power grid will face significant stresses and electricity blackouts will become more common. Since virtually all other critical infrastructure sectors rely on electricity to function, including the water and wastewater sector, improving the resilience of the country’s power grid is a critical national security requirement. One of the biggest challenges in the electric grid is that substations are not connected to one another, and thus if one substation fails another one in the area cannot provide backup power. This is an intended safety feature in the grid “so that an issue at one substation, such as a fault current (a large spike in electric current) doesn’t cascade down through the system and impact other substations,” according to DHS.

Toward that end, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) in collaboration with the private company American Superconductor (AMSC) - a provider of megawatt-scale power resiliency solutions – launched a project in 2007 to create a Resilient Electric Grid (REG) system in Chicago. The project built upon previous research on High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) cables. After years of research, development, and testing the project team created REG systems with cable systems that employ AMSC’s proprietary Amperium HTS technology intended to suppress surges while providing the capability to link substations without risking a cascading fault current.

The project team partnered with Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), a large electric utility in Illinois, to test the concept in practice. The team recently announced the successful installation and operation of the REG system in Chicago. “The successful integration of the REG system is a major milestone in our efforts to enhance our service to customers through innovation,” said Terence R. Donnelly, President and COO of ComEd. ComEd is now evaluating further expanding use of the system, to include by connecting it to multiple substations to create a back-up system for continuous power delivery even with a disruption to the power grid. DHS S&T hopes the system’s expansion won’t just be limited to ComEd, with potential applications for other utilities. “S&T will continue to monitor the REG system’s performance with hopes for future commercialization, as other utilities look to increase grid resiliency,” said DHS S&T project team lead Sarah Mahmood. Read more at DHS.