§17384a Smart Grid Modeling, Visualization, Architecture, and Controls

Summary

The Secretary must set up a research and development program no later than 180 days after December 27, 2020, to improve electric grid modeling, sensing, visualization, architecture, operations, and controls. The program must fund models that help design and run a secure grid, including models that show how physical and cyber attacks affect the grid, linked electrical/physical/cyber models, models for new technologies and changing generation mixes, and integrated models of communications, transmission, and distribution. The Secretary must also fund tools for real-time sensing, monitoring, and visualization using data from devices like phasor measurement units and advanced metering units, with priority on improving awareness during cyber and natural emergencies. Research must include operator training facilities, new control ideas (for example, adaptive islanding, dynamic line ratings, power flow controllers, smart circuit breakers, intelligent load shedding, and fault-tolerant control designs), real-time AI and machine learning controls, and advanced data analytics. The program must also work on making new components compatible with old ones and study underground transmission and distribution lines—lowering costs, extending life, adding wireless sensors for safety and fault detection, and reducing damage from flooding, storm surge, and seasonal cycles. The Secretary must create a collaborative process to build model grid architectures and future scenarios that test many combinations of resources, including more renewables, distributed energy, electric vehicle charging, storage, and decentralized control, and must consider effects on communications, markets, emergency response, electrification, and cybersecurity. The work should, when possible, look at different market structures and possible stranded costs. The program must use National Laboratory computing resources and help develop voluntary data and communication standards. Private companies are not required to share data with the Secretary. Resilience here means the ability to withstand and reduce the size or length of disruptive events, including being able to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, or quickly recover from attacks, accidents, or natural threats.