The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) announced at the end of January that it will create open-access datasets for researchers and industry.
To fund this venture, the DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) $3 million for two projects in a new program – generating realistic information for the development of distribution and transmission algorithms (GRID DATA).
In one project, the PNNL will develop a sustainable data evolution technology (SDET). The first step begins with researchers gathering features and metrics from private datasets provided by the laboratory’s industry partners. The team will include the National Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation Association, GE Grid Solutions, PJM Interconnection, the California Independent System Operator and Avista.
“Creating algorithms to optimize the grid essentially comes down to a challenging mathematical problem,” Henry Huang, an engineer at PNNL, said. “It’s like the old saying ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ We need to get the right numbers — realistic numbers — into the algorithms needed for modeling so that utilities and grid operators feel confident in adopting new technologies being developed to modernize the grid.”
The data creation tools and datasets will be made available through a data repository, which also will be created by PNNL.