• POWER-GRID SECURITYScientists Put Forth a Smarter Way to Protect a Smarter Grid

    By Tom Rickey

    Proliferation of programmable devices presents more gateways for cyberattack. That makes the electric grid, increasingly chock full of devices that interact with one another and make critical decisions, vulnerable to bad actors who might try to turn off the power, damage the system or worse.

  • NEXTGEN POWER GRIDNorthwest Region-Wide Effort for the Next Generation Electrical Grid

    Smart grids offer an important defense against climate change: smart devices improve energy efficiency and data and automation help keep grids stable, even if the share of renewable energy increases. They thus address the problem of short-term disruptions to solar and wind power, such as when clouds obscure the sun or winds die down.

  • WAR IN UKRAINEAnother Problem for Russia in Ukraine: Effective Satellites Are Few and Far Between

    By Mark Krutov Sergei Dobrynin

    The Russian forces have faced many problems in Ukraine. A big item on the list of problems: satellites — there are too few of them, and too few with high-quality capabilities. According to experts and open-source information, Russia has long been saddled with a small and inadequate fleet of communications and surveillance satellites that in many cases rely on either outdated technology or imported parts that are now harder to come by due to Western sanctions.

  • ELECTRIC GRIDSmart Electric Grid to Power Our Future

    A novel plan that offers partnership in keeping the United States electric grid stable and reliable could be a win-win for consumers and utility operators.

  • Electric gridBatteries: Reshaping the Future of the Electric Grid

    Research begun at the Department of Energy’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research and continued at spinoff company Form Energy may launch a new era of renewable energy.

  • GridGuiding Research Direction for Grid-Forming Inverters

    Power electronics—including the inverters that interface solar, wind, battery energy storage, and electric vehicles—are on track to gradually, or even entirely, displace traditional generation. In doing so, inverters will inherit new responsibilities and introduce a new set of challenges.

  • Electronic resurgenceFirst annual Electronics Resurgence Initiative summit announced

    The microelectronics community is facing an array of long foreseen obstacles to Moore’s Law, the transistor scaling that has allowed for fifty years of rapid progress in electronics. Current economic, geopolitical, and physics-based complications make the future of the electronics industry uniquely interesting at this moment. The U.S. electronics community will convene in late July to inaugurate a five-year, $1.5B effort to create transformative advances in electronics.

  • Grid securityThe smart grid makes it easier for hackers to turn out the lights

    The development of the smart power grid and the smart meter in our homes to accompany it brings several benefits, such as improved delivery and more efficient billing. Conversely, any digital, connected technology also represents a security risk. The smart electricity grid is more vulnerable to accidental and incidental problems with the flow of data, and to malicious manipulation for the sake of sabotage, criminal, or online military or terrorist action.

  • GridLeaving the electrical grid in the Upper Peninsula

    While Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is not the sunniest place in the world, solar energy is viable in the region. With new technologies, some people might be inclined to leave the electrical grid. Researched looked into the economic viability of grid defection in the Upper Peninsula, and found that by 2020, leaving the electrical grid is a viable economic option for the majority of seasonal households (92 percent) as well as single-family owner-occupied households (65 percent).

  • GridSandia Labs playing a leading role in grid modernization

    Sandia National Laboratories is leading the Security and Resilience area of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC), saying it is bringing its research capability in grid modernization to help the nation modernize its power grid. The consortium includes scientists and engineers from across fourteen DOE national labs and dozens of industry, academic, and state and local government partners, aligned into six technical areas.

  • GridGrid Security Conference focuses on information sharing among stakeholders

    More than 300 industry and federal partners are participating in the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) annual grid security conference, or GridSecCon, in Philadelphia, which opened on Wednesday and ends today. The conference is focusing on key cyber and physical security issues and training for enhancing the security and resiliency of the North American bulk power system. Topics of panel discussions include upgrades to NERC’s E-ISAC, cyber and physical security technology options, the transition to Version 5 of NERC’s critical infrastructure protection standards; and expectations for NERC’s third grid security exercise, GridEx III, which takes place 18-19 November.

  • GridWill the Supreme Court kill the smart grid?

    By Seth Blumsack

    On 30 April, Tesla’s Elon Musk took the stage in California to introduce the company’s Powerwall battery energy storage system, which he hopes will revolutionize the dormant market for household and utility-scale batteries. A few days later, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear a case during its fall term that could very well determine whether Tesla’s technology gamble succeeds or fails. At issue is an obscure federal policy known in the dry language of the electricity business as “Order 745,” which a lower court vacated last year. Order 745 allowed electricity customers to be paid for reducing electricity usage from the grid — a practice known as “demand response.” It also stipulated that demand response customers would be paid the market price for not using the grid — like the power industry’s version of paying farmers not to grow corn. This case, ultimately, is far more significant than getting paid for not using electricity. It’s about who gets to set the rules of the road for emerging technology in the electricity sector — the states or the federal government — and whether the United States will be able to modernize its energy policy the same way that it would like to modernize its power grid.

  • GridSmart grid concept advanced by distributed technique for power “scheduling”

    Currently, power infrastructure uses a centralized scheduling approach to forecast and coordinate the energy produced at the thousands of large power plants around the country. Researchers have developed a new technique for “scheduling” energy in electric grids that moves away from centralized management by tapping into the distributed computing power of energy devices. The approach advances the smart grid concept by coordinating the energy being produced and stored by both conventional and renewable sources.

  • GridSmart grid needed to shift electrical system to alternative energy: Expert

    Solar, wind, and other alternative sources are easier on the environment but less predictable than coal, gas, or oil-fired plants, demanding a more sophisticated distribution and delivery system. A more resilient, responsive electrical grid – a smart grid – would adjust electrical loads to energy demands, preventing the shutdowns that leave people without air conditioning just when they need it most. A smart grid is thus a flexible grid – it is an infrastructure which allows shifting load and demand around effectively, ultimately balancing the electrical power and delivery system at lower costs.

  • GridAging grid cannot keep up with growing demand for electricity

    The demand for electricity in the United States increased by around 20 percent from 1999 to 2009, but transmission capacity only increased by around 7 percent in that time. From 2000 to 2004, there were 140 instances of power outages which each affected 50,000 or more consumers. This number increased to 303 from 2005 to 2009. Between 2010 and 2012, there were 226 such outages. The average age of a power plant is 30-years old, and around 75 percent of America’s power lines are 25-years old. Economists estimate that these power outages cost the country more than $70 billion in annual economic loss.