2022 R&D 100 Award for GridEye: A Wide-Area Power Grid Real-Time Situational Awareness System

  • Liu, Yilu (Recipient), Yin, He (Recipient), Yu, Wenpeng (Recipient), King Jr, Thomas (Recipient), Zhan, Lingwei (Recipient), You, Shutang (Recipient), Zhao, Yi (Recipient), Dong, Jiaojiao (Recipient), Wu, Yuru (Recipient), Jiang, Zhihao (Recipient), Jia, Xinlan (Recipient), Qiu, Wei (Recipient), Zhang, Chengwen (Recipient), Chen, Chang (Recipient), Zeng, Chujie (Recipient), Li, Hongyu (Recipient), Gardner, Matt (Recipient) & Zhu, Lin (Recipient)

Prize: Honorary award

Description

As climate change causes frequent major weather events and power grids rely increasingly on renewable energy sources, the need for greater situational awareness and event monitoring continues to grow.

To quickly detect and provide information about major events across the North American power grid, researchers at UT and ORNL developed a monitoring system, GridEye.

GridEye uses more than 300 frequency disturbance recorders — monitors that can be installed anywhere with an 110V outlet, Ethernet and GPS access — to collect data on frequency variation across the grid. Sudden changes in frequency indicate an unusual event, such as an electric generator shutdown.

Within seconds, GridEye can detect anomalies within the system to pinpoint their locations and the size of the power loss. The technology then sends out alerts with email event analysis reports featuring incident details and location information to power companies, grid operators and other stakeholders, so affected parties can take the proper actions, such as ramp up additional power generation.

GridEye is the first and only monitoring solution for electric power grids across North America and allows power companies to see outside their own service areas.

Funding for this project was provided by DOE, the National Science Foundation, Dominion Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority, North American Electric Reliability Corporation and Electric Power Research Institute.

UT-ORNL Governor's Chair Yilu Liu and UT’s He Yin and Wenpeng Yu led the research. Contributors to GridEye’s development include ORNL’s Thomas J. King Jr. and Lingwei Zhan; UT’s Shutang You, Yi Zhao, Jiaojiao Dong, Yuru Wu, Zhihao Jiang, Xinlan Jia, Wei Qiu, Chengwen Zhang, Chang Chen, Chujie Zeng and Hongyu Li; Dominion Energy’s Matt Gardner; and Electric Power Research Institute’s Lin Zhu.

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