ELECTRIC GRIDPlanning the Future of America’s Vast Electric Grid

By Jared Sagoff

America’s electric grid is one of the largest and most complicated pieces of infrastructure ever built. It is intended to deliver electricity nearly 100% of the time in any situation. The electric grid must be resilient, secure, cost-effective and equitable. This means that the grid must be able to operate under a wide variety of different scenarios, including normal operating conditions as well as during disasters. Additionally, the grid must produce electricity inexpensively and, in theory, provide electricity to everyone equally.

Managing tradeoffs while maintaining those four key characteristics is really difficult, said Mark Petri, director of the Electric Power Grid Program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

Petri noted that America’s power grid was initially conceived in the early 20^th century to distribute power unidirectionally from plants powered by fossil fuels to buildings and residences.

Recently, as electric cars have entered the landscape, scientists and grid operators have encountered an additional challenge and opportunity. Electric cars and their batteries can form two-way connections with the grid, both drawing power to charge but also potentially supplying energy back to the grid. The electrification of America’s transportation sector will represent a huge additional source of demand on the grid for which operators will need to prepare, Petri said.

Electric vehicles will not be the only new source of demand for electricity, Petri explained. ​“You think of not only electric vehicles but also industry changing out natural gas for electricity for heating and manufacturing or data centers for artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency mining — these things require huge amounts of electricity that has never been needed before.”

All these systems have multiple interconnection points at which the grid interacts with other infrastructure. ​“We’re not just looking at the electric power grid in isolation, but how it intersects with natural gas and telecommunications. We want to see how it interacts with our critical infrastructure, and through that we’re able to look at how interdependent systems behave in both normal and abnormal conditions,” Petri said. This way, he said, researchers can understand the potential implications of and strategies for mitigating risks to the grid system, whether they’re natural (as in the case of extreme weather) or man-made (like a cyberattack).