POWERGRID RESILIENCEMaking the Power Grid More Reliable and Resilient
The U.S. power grid comprises nearly 12,000 power plants, 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, 60,000 substations and 3 million miles of power lines. It may well be the most massive and complex machine ever assembled. Argonne National Labs’ researchers help keep this machine working in the face of daunting challenges.
The U.S. power grid is almost incomprehensibly large. Comprising nearly 12,000 power plants, 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, 60,000 substations and 3 million miles of power lines, it may well be the most massive and complex machine ever assembled. Households, businesses, governments and essential infrastructure — including water, telecommunications, food supply, health care and wastewater treatment — rely on the grid around the clock. The power it generates fuels the U.S. economy.
All this complexity makes it critical to understand the vulnerabilities of the nation’s electric transmission and distribution systems and to protect the grid from an evolving set of human-caused and natural hazards. Those can include cyberattacks from foreign governments and terrorists as well as extreme weather events driven by climate change. Record-setting heat waves, unprecedented storms and flooding, historic droughts and wildfires all pose hazards to the grid.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory plays a vital role in maintaining and developing a stable and secure grid. At the nation’s first national lab, located in southwest suburban Chicago, scientists and engineers bring to bear collective expertise in economics, threat assessment and mitigation, system vulnerability analysis, critical infrastructure interdependency modeling, proactive cybersecurity defense and emergency readiness and response support. The lab also leverages cutting-edge high performance computing hardware, mathematical software technologies, and artificial intelligence and machine learning resources.
“What sets Argonne apart is that we are very good at looking at all these problems from a multidisciplinary perspective,” says Mark Petri, head of the lab’s Electric Power Grid Program, who leads security and resilience activities. Petri also serves as technical team lead for the Markets, Policies & Regulations pillar of DOE’s Grid Modernization Initiative. “We bring together engineers, infrastructure analysts, computer scientists and modelers, artificial intelligence experts, economists, battery researchers and others in a focused effort to tackle these critical national challenges. There are no research silos here.”
Argonne also collaborates with local, state, regional, tribal and territorial stakeholders, as well as academia, utilities and other national laboratories. This helps Argonne develop and deploy innovative solutions and advanced technologies that enhance the grid’s ability to withstand and recover from threats. Argonne is a key contributor to the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium, a strategic partnership between DOE and the national labs to bring together leading experts, technologies and resources to collaborate on the goal of modernizing the nation’s grid.
