Grid protectionSecuring U.S. complex electrical grid
With 20,000 power plants, 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, 60,000 substations and 3 million miles of power line, the nation’s electrical grid is perhaps the largest and most complex machine ever assembled. Yet its size and complexity make the grid vulnerable to major disruptions, as evidenced by the widespread power outage in the United States in 2003 – when the shutdown of a high-voltage power line in northern Ohio initiated a sequence of events that caused cascading blackouts that, within hours, affected more than 50 million Americans across eight states and the Canadian province of Ontario. In the years since, the interdependencies among critical and lifeline infrastructure assets have only grown.
With 20,000 power plants, 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, 60,000 substations and 3 million miles of power line, the nation’s electrical grid is perhaps the largest and most complex machine ever assembled.
Yet its size and complexity make the grid vulnerable to major disruptions, as evidenced by the widespread power outage in the United States in 2003 – when the shutdown of a high-voltage power line in northern Ohio initiated a sequence of events that caused cascading blackouts that, within hours, affected more than 50 million Americans across eight states and the Canadian province of Ontario.
In the years since, the interdependencies among critical and lifeline infrastructure assets have only grown, and technologies for distributed energy — like solar panels and wind turbines — are becoming more prevalent. Such increasing complexity is changing how consumers and utilities interact with the grid and present a new set of challenges for our aging grid infrastructure. Addressing these challenges will be critical to maintaining reliable and secure electric power to help ensure health, safety and continued economic growth for decades to come.
ANL says that at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, scientists from multiple disciplines are leveraging their collective expertise and world-class facilities to solve these complex problems. Their efforts are helping to make the U.S. electric grid more resilient against all hazards, from natural events like hurricanes, earthquakes and winter storms, to potential cyber attacks or other acts of terrorism — while also staying adaptive to new technological changes.
Argonne is also working as key contributor in the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium, a strategic partnership between DOE and the National Laboratories to bring together leading experts, technologies and resources to collaborate on the goal of modernizing the nation’s grid. The research spans many departments at the laboratory, including Decision and Infrastructure Sciences, Energy Systems, Strategic Security Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science, among others.
