RESILIENCEPower Boost: Resilient Systems to Energize the Future
Life without electricity is not just cold, dark and quiet. Disruptions to the electric grid, whether from hurricanes, wildfires or cyberattacks, can threaten lives as well as comfort.
Life without electricity is not just cold, dark and quiet. Disruptions to the electric grid, whether from hurricanes, wildfires or cyberattacks, can threaten lives as well as comfort.Sandia’s work to strengthen and protect the electric grid and other critical infrastructure was recently highlighted at Resilience Week. Resilience Week annually brings together government, academic institutions, national labs and industry around the topic of resilient critical infrastructure.
“You can’t eat an electron,” Sandia Renewable Energy and Distributed Systems Integration manager Summer Ferreira said. “You can’t drink it. An electron doesn’t keep you warm. But electrons, in the form of electricity, enable the services people need.”
Summer and her staff conduct research focused on the distribution end of the electric system. “We think about the challenges holistically, in the context of resilience to people,” Summer said. “How do people get what they need with electricity as a tool?”
Birk Jones sat on a panel discussing cyber-physical resilience for distributed energy resources. He noted that as photovoltaic systems provide an increasing amount of the nation’s electricity, cybersecurity for these systems becomes more important.
“Grid operators are not used to this much solar, and it’s a lot to handle,” Birk said. “Being able to manage it and control it reliably and resiliently is important, because we depend on these resources.”
George Fragkos presented a poster and participated on a panel. George’s work focuses on cybersecurity for distributed energy, including photovoltaic panels. George authored a journal article with other Sandians on detecting cyber intrusions for grid-connected distributed energy resources. The paper received the Best Paper Award by the Resilience Week committee.
George describes his work as cyber-physical security supercharged by artificial intelligence. “I develop machine-learning algorithms to detect and respond to anomalies in real time,” George said. “If something seems weird in the communication packet, the system triggers an alert and drops the packet. The packet never reaches the DER (distributed energy resource), so the DER remains protected.”
Brian Pierre, manager of Sandia’s Electric Power Systems Research program, participated in a panel at Resilience Week discussing novel approaches to infrastructure risk management and resilience. Without energy and the electric grid, “we basically go back to the Stone Age,” Brian said. “Having resilience and keeping those services intact without interruption, especially without interruption for long periods of time, is vital to everything that we do.”
Brian’s department focuses on the electric grid from the bulk system, such as large generation plants and transmission, to the community level. That work includes the ties to other critical infrastructure, such as interactions with natural gas networks, water systems and communications.
“If you lose any of those services for days, things can get really, really bad for a lot of people, especially people in need of medical supplies or in harsh environments,” Brian said.
Sandia’s work protecting critical infrastructure is funded by multiple customers and crosses many groups. One of Sandia’s mission campaigns is Resilient Energy Systems, now in its fourth year. Protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure is one of the drivers behind Sandia’s Energy and Homeland Security portfolio strategy.
Some of the other panel sessions that featured Sandians included energy planning across spatial scales, communication pathways for the power grid and distributed wind as an energy resource.
Brent Houchens represented Sandia as the moderator for the distributed wind energy session. One technology that Brent works on is airborne wind energy, such as tethered sails or kites, rather than windmills or wind turbines. This resource could be deployed and moved as needed, to get out of the path of a hurricane, for example.
Airborne wind energy could also be deployed in areas not usually considered windy at ground level, because wind is more consistent at higher altitudes. “Even in places where you can’t practically generate wind energy at near-ground level,” Brent said, “you can go to 400 meters and find good wind.”
Research on current and future energy sources will be important as the nation’s electricity needs continue to increase, with data centers and electric vehicles part of the growth in demand.
Brian noted that resilience isn’t just about responding to what’s happened in the past. He believes Sandia can play an important role in thinking over the horizon to prepare infrastructure for future states. After a hurricane or similar event damages critical infrastructure, “you don’t want to build back to where you were,” Brian said. “You want to plan for the future and build back to be even better and more resilient.”
Hollie Hohlfelder is Program Communications Specialist at Sandia National Laboratories. The article was originally posted to the website of Sandia National Laboratories.
