To accelerate analysis of regional extreme weather threats and impacts on the electric grid, the Grid Deployment Office of Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $600,000 to fund the project titled “Texas A&M and Prairie View A&M Regional Grid Consortium“. With duration of one year, it will start on August 1, 2024. The principal investigator (PI) is Thomas Overbye, Ph.D., professor and holder of the O’Donnell Foundation Chair III in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU), and Director of TEES Smart Grid Center. He will lead the weather and climate modeling and simulation. The PI from Prairie View A&M University, Ervin Emanuel, P.E., director of the SMART grid center at Prairie View A&M University, will lead the AI/ML projects. The team also includes Karen Butler-Purry, Ph.D., P.E. leading the EV integration studies, and Xin Chen, Ph.D. leading the decarbonization efforts. Adam Birchfield, Ph.D., and researchers Farnaz Safdarian, Ph.D. and Jonathan Snodgrass, Ph.D. at Texas A&M University complete the team, along with their graduate and undergraduate students.
Background:
Electricity is the lifeblood of modern society, yet even brief outages remain costly and the consequences of large-scale, long duration power outages are catastrophic. Amidst massive changes in our energy infrastructure as we move towards carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050, we face many challenges to achieving this vision, particularly associated with the resiliency of our electric grids and ensuring that the changes being implemented benefit all stakeholders, and especially those from Justice40 and underserved communities.
To address this need, Texas A&M University and Prairie View A&M University, as leaders in electric grid resilience research, are an effective resource to help the states, tribes, utilities, and other regional entities meet energy resilience and decarbonization goals not only during the period of the initial project, but for years beyond. The team will focus on four primary projects in areas of weather and climate, decarbonization, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and transportation electrification. Our vast and extensive suite of tools, models, and depth of experience will be utilized and expanded to provide the stakeholders with quantitative and qualitative data to enable an assessment of the risk and resiliency of the electric power grid. For each of the specific projects, we will build on our team’s long history in the electric power industry of helping multitudes, while maintaining the aim of listening first, and engaging with key stakeholders to identify key needs of the communities we seek to serve.
The DOE press release on the total of $4.6 million investment of the government is posted here.
Highlighted project at DOE Grid Deployment Office website linked here.
