We are amid a massive change in our energy infrastructure as we move towards 100% clean electric energy. It is an exciting time, yet there are also many challenges to achieving this vision, particularly associated with the resiliency of our electric grids and in ensuring that the changes benefit all Americans. Electricity is the lifeblood of our modern society, with even brief outages being costly and the consequences of a large-scale, long duration power outage catastrophic.
A new 3-year research project titled “Research, Development and Demonstration of a Natural Hazard and Large Language Model Enhanced Electric Grid Planning Tool” with total cost of nearly $3.5M has been awarded by Department of Energy, Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency (CESER). The lead organization is Texas A&M University Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) and 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. The research team also includes Miroslav Begovic, Ph.D. (Co-PI, professor, ECE, TAMU), and key personnel Adam Birchfield, Ph.D. (assistant professor, ECE, TAMU), Kate Davis, Ph.D. (associate professor, ECE, TAMU), John Nielsen-Gammon, Ph.D. (professor, ATMO, TAMU), Stephanie Paal, Ph.D. (associate professor, CEE), Le Xie, Ph.D. (professor, Harvard), Xin Chen, Ph.D. (assistant professor, ECE), Astrid Layton, Ph.D. (assistant professor, ME), Elnaz Kabir, Ph.D. (assistant professor, ET&ID), Jonathan Snodgrass, Ph.D. (senior research engineer, ECE), Farnaz Safdarian, Ph.D. (senior research engineer, ECE), Mark Laufenberg, Ph.D. and Jamie Weber, Ph.D. (PowerWorld Corporation), Ervin Emanuel, P.E. (chief scientist, PVAMU), Don Morrow (GridFocus LLC).
To help identify, characterize, detect, and mitigate risks to the electric grid due to weather and other natural hazards, the focus of the project is the research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of electric grid planning tools that have been enhanced to directly model natural hazards including extreme weather, climate change, and also enhanced to include Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities. Modeling the impacts of other hazards, such as Geomagnetic disturbances (GMD), High Altitude
Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP), earthquakes and wildfires will also be considered.
The DOE announcement can be viewed here.
The ECE article on the topic is here.