Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “grid and infrastructure”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 289 records · Page 16
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Medium and Heavy-Duty Electric Vehicle Infrastructure - Load Operations and Deployment (HEVI-LOAD) v1.0

In order to support the California state goals to reduce the carbon and pollution emissions (AB2127), The goal of this project (HEVI-Pro) is to project the charging infrastructure needs by future medium- and heavy- duty electric vehicles, and assess optimal deployment the infrastructure in California and provide grid impacts analysis. The MHDV projections will also consider transportation system and electric system interaction with light duty vehicles. The project consists of 2 approaches in general: top-down approach that takes aggregated MHDV adoptions as the inputs and provide the county-level projections of charging load profile and infrastructure need, and the bottom-up approach that that incorporates more granular (temporal, spatial and duty-cycle-specific) behaviors of a variety of MHDVs into activity simulations/optimizations for further analysis.

Wang, Bin↗
DOE OSTI2021

Smart Meter Pinging and Reading Through AMI Two-Way Communication Networks to Monitor Grid Edge Devices and DERs

Today’s power distribution system is changing to a power-electronics-enabled distribution system, especially with the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). To monitor and manage those electronic devices and DERs at the grid edge, the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) with two-way communications presents great potential. At present, extensive research explores the upstream communication from smart meters to electric utilities (e.g., meter reading) but few examine the downstream communication from the utilities to smart meters (e.g., meter pinging). This article discusses the AMI two-way communication and its recent industrial practice in the U.S., especially for applying the smart meter pinging functionality to monitor grid-edge devices and DERs. This paper then develops the two-way communication model and the network calculus method to quantify the impact of the two-way communication on the AMI network. In the end, the proposed method is validated with ns-3 simulation using the modified 13-node test feeder and real-world feeder systems.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Caldera_Grid

Caldera Grid is part of Caldera software platform, a suite of collective, open-source tools that was developed to improve the state of the art in modeling the impacts of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging on the grid. Caldera Grid is a co-simulation framework implemented using Hierarchical Engine for Large scale Infrastructure Co-Simulation (HELICS). The framework facilitates the co-simulation of EV charging and Smart Charge Management (SCM) strategies in Caldera Infrastructure Charge Model (ICM) with distribution level grid models in OpenDSS. Vehicle energy needs and charge session requirements generated using Caldera Charge Decision Module (CDM) are fed in as input to Caldera Grid. The EV charging models in Caldera ICM simulates both the uncontrolled charging loads as well as loads modified by the SCM strategies to develop distributed load profiles for each grid node hosting an Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) – also known as chargers. These loads were simulated in OpenDSS alongside existing distribution feeder loads. Each of these models are co-simulated in a HELICS federate. The HELICS co-simulation framework facilitates communication and synchronization between the federates. By co-simulating EV loads and distribution feeder loads, Caldera Grid can assess the potential grid impacts of EV charging on distribution feeders under various grid conditions. A control strategy federate is implemented with an interface where control strategies based on feedback from EV charging status and grid conditions can be developed and implemented. The platform can also support multiple control strategies in a single co-simulation.

Sundarrajan, ManojKumar Cebol↗
DOE OSTI2022

Near-Term Reliability and Resilience (NTRR) (Final Report)

The Near-Term Reliability and Resiliency (NTRR) was awarded in December 2020 as an inter-lab project to examine the reliability and resilience of the electricity grid and natural gas transportation availability. The project builds on studies conducted by The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and other non-governmental research and operational focused on reliability and resilience analyses challenges. The research was conceived to address near-term scenarios (within 10 years), when many local and regional policy transitions could begin to impact grid reliability, resilience, and supporting infrastructure availability. To integrate the natural gas interdependency, the team began with the generating capacity and demand projections from the 2020 NERC Long-Term Reliability Assessment and the Bulk Electric System (BES) transmission topologies defined in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) Anchor Data Set, Eastern Interconnection Reliability Assessment Group Multi-Regional Modeling Working Group (ERAG/MMWG) Data Set, the team calculated baseline regional power sector gas demands from present electricity delivery year through the end of delivery year 2030/31 by applying security constrained economic dispatch. This demand was compiled along with demand projections for regional residential, commercial, and industrial natural gas demands from the most recent Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook Reference Case into Deloitte’s MarketBuilder® North American Gas Model. Through the application of these demands, MarketBuilder® was projected the topology of natural gas flows in the natural gas pipeline network across the interconnected North American system along with regional natural gas prices that may be seen by market participants in future years Additionally, contingencies and sensitivities focused on the built models of the Eastern Interconnection (EI) and Western Interconnection (WI). They address challenges from the following with the outcomes being an identification of performance under the extreme conditions and an identification of potential grid weaknesses that should be addressed to mitigate the reduced performance and improve the resilience and reliability of the specific regions as well as the National Grid: • Weather events including extreme heat, extreme cold, high wind, no wind, wind and solar forecasting errors, and wildfires. • Gas availability, factoring in supply disruption (contractual and physical), seasonal availability constraints, and infrastructure limitations; and • Transmission availability and congestion.

03 NATURAL GAS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Real-Time Federated Cyber-Transmission-Distribution Testbed Architecture for the Resiliency Analysis

With the ongoing automation driven by the push toward the smart electric grid and the advancement in associated cyber infrastructure, the interaction between physical [electric transmission and distribution (T&D) systems], cyber (communication, automation, and control), and human (grid operators and decision-makers) is increasingly becoming more complex. This creates the requirement of analyzing the effect of the transmission system on the distribution system and vice versa with consideration of the additional complexity of the cyber infrastructure. Such an integrated testbed will also help with resiliency analysis, where resiliency refers to the ability of the system to continue serving energy to the critical loads even with limited extreme contingencies. Interaction of the physical power grid with the cyber layer can be effectively modeled using real-time (RT) simulator for developing and validating various operational and control algorithms. Testbeds using RT simulators with multiple capabilities have been developed at different institutions. Still, no single existing testbed can offer full scalability while simultaneously meeting high fidelity requirements for resiliency experimentation. Co-simulating federated testbed assets can provide a scalable experimentation platform that can be leveraged for verification and validation. In this article, an architecture is developed for federated cyber-physical testbed. A local federation with two real-time simulators is developed: real-time digital simulator (RTDS) and OPAL-RT have been interfaced using VILLAS framework for end-to-end testing. Also, a real-time linear predictor is developed and integrated here to address the communication latency impact on geographically allocated federated RT simulation. Finally, resiliency analysis tools are formulated and utilized for T&D systems. Finally as an illustrative use case, the resiliency of a T&D test system is simulated, and the results are analyzed. A 179-bus Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) transmission system is developed using OPAL-RT/ HYPERSIM, and a modified IEEE 13 node feeder system is modeled in RTDS/RSCAD and interfaced for resiliency analysis.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Grid-Integrated Electric Mobility Model (GEM) v1.0

Transportation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy consumption globally. The convergence of shared mobility, vehicle automation, and electrification has the potential to drastically reduce transportation impacts, but requires careful integration with rapidly evolving electricity systems. We have developed the GEM Model (Grid-Integrated Electric Mobility) to examine these interactions with a U.S.-wide simulation framework encompassing private electric vehicles (EVs); shared automated EVs (SAEVs); charging infrastructure; controlled EV charging; and a grid economic dispatch model to simulate mobility futures exclusively using EVs. We find that an SAEV fleet 9% the size of today's active vehicles can satisfy trip demand with only 2.6 million chargers (0.2 per EV). Controlled EV charging can also reduce electricity demand variability, significantly reducing GHG emissions and decreasing solar curtailment by about one-third. While private EVs with uncontrolled charging would reduce GHG emissions by 53% compared to gasoline vehicles, SAEVs could achieve a 70% reduction.

Sheppard, Colin↗
DOE OSTI2022

EVSE Cybersecurity and Resilience

Consequence-driven Cybersecurity Analysis for Extreme Fast Charging Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Electric vehicle (EV) development and associated charging infrastructure are expected to advance rapidly. Thirty percent of all global vehicle sales may be EVs and hybrid EVs by 2025, and they will rely on increasingly sophisticated strategies for grid integration. Next-generation EV charging infrastructure is expected to include interconnected renewable resources, such as photovoltaic (PV) arrays and battery storage systems, along with grid-edge devices. Although distributed energy resources (DERs) are useful in several ways, such as peak shaving at high demand times and backup supply for added resilience, the integration of vehicle charging and DERs could create more avenues for cyberattack. Physical and/or remote access to EV charging station components, including charge ports, power electronics, controllers, and local generation (e.g., PV and energy storage) could be paths to cause power fluctuations, leading to altered operations at the charging station, escalated privileges to administrative systems, exfiltration of financial information (including personally identifiable information), and reduced grid stability. One compromised EV supply equipment component can open the door to a variety of exploitable vulnerabilities. Cloud computing and mobile application control have the potential to expand the threat surface to non-repudiation and firmware integrity challenges. Vendor clouds have access to hundreds of chargers, and if compromised, can scale the attack surface exponentially. The high power and voltage levels of xFC infrastructure (e.g., 400 kW at 1000- V DC) increase the hazards and ability to impact the grid and vehicles more than lower-power charging systems. Legacy communications systems and protocols could also put EV infrastructure at risk of cyberattacks requiring a robust patch management process. Communications networks link EVs and chargers to several stakeholders - including charging station operators, grid operators, vendors/manufacturers, and aggregators - who have both physical and network access to share information for control, monitoring, and analytics. Information in these networks that is vulnerable to compromise includes the state of charge, charging duration, payment information, electricity price, and load control. Analyzing and prioritizing these interconnections risks could help address cybersecurity related to data leakage and manipulation.

charging↗
DOE OSTI2025

Architecting the Grid Edge: Ensuring Reliability and Resilience

Changes in technology, customer expectations, and business and regulatory environments are rapidly evolving causing fundamental changes in the nation’s electrical infrastructure. Nowhere is this more apparent that at the “grid edge”, where there is an increasing number of new devices and systems, as well as complex new interactions between them. This is leading to the traditional relationship between the end-use customers and their utilities being expanded by an increasing number of stakeholders, each with their own operational and financial objectives, governed by regulatory policy. While there are concerns about the rapidly increasing complexity negatively impacting reliable and resilience of the electrical infrastructure, these changes are also bringing new resources and opportunities that hold great potential if they can be properly coordinated. This white paper outlines the considerations for the coordination of multi-stakeholder objectives with electric utility requirements using the concept of grid services. Describing a framework that enables new stakeholders to achieve their local technical and economic objectives, while simultaneously delivering operational benefits to the electrical infrastructure. The concepts of grid architecture are presented as a tool to evaluate how stakeholders might participate in, and benefit from, services, and how utilities can make decision on the reliance on services to ensure reliability and resilience, translating abstract concepts into actionable information for utilities and grid edge stakeholders. The end result of proper coordination, informed by grid architecture, will be a range of new devices and systems, operated by new stakeholders, achieving their local objectives while also increasing the reliability, resilience, security, and affordability of the nation’s critical electrical infrastructure.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Architecting the Grid Edge: Ensuring Reliability and Resilience

Changes in technology, customer expectations, and business and regulatory environments are rapidly evolving causing fundamental changes in the nation’s electrical infrastructure. Nowhere is this more apparent that at the “grid edge”, where there is an increasing number of new devices and systems, as well as complex new interactions between them. This is leading to the traditional relationship between the end-use customers and their utilities being expanded by an increasing number of stakeholders, each with their own operational and financial objectives, governed by regulatory policy. While there are concerns about the rapidly increasing complexity negatively impacting reliable and resilience of the electrical infrastructure, these changes are also bringing new resources and opportunities that hold great potential if they can be properly coordinated. This white paper outlines the considerations for the coordination of multi-stakeholder objectives with electric utility requirements using the concept of grid services. Describing a framework that enables new stakeholders to achieve their local technical and economic objectives, while simultaneously delivering operational benefits to the electrical infrastructure. The concepts of grid architecture are presented as a tool to evaluate how stakeholders might participate in, and benefit from, services, and how utilities can make decision on the reliance on services to ensure reliability and resilience, translating abstract concepts into actionable information for utilities and grid edge stakeholders. The end result of proper coordination, informed by grid architecture, will be a range of new devices and systems, operated by new stakeholders, achieving their local objectives while also increasing the reliability, resilience, security, and affordability of the nation’s critical electrical infrastructure.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

GLIMPSE of Future Power Grid Models

Power grid is one of the critical national infrastructures with social, economics, and national security impacts. Particularly, power distribution systems represent part of the infrastructure between power distribution substations and customers such as residential, commercial, and industrial. To address various grid modernization challenges, state-of-the-art algorithms and methodologies have been developed to deploy, operate, and expand a secure and resilient power grid. At the same time, there is a need to develop capabilities to assist power grid stakeholders to quickly get insight into the design and structure of the grid. Data visualization is a key approach to comprehend and understand complex systems such as the power grid. We present GLIMPSE Grid Layout Interface for Model Preview and System Exploration), a graph-based semantic-aware application to visualize and update distribution power grid models. The GLIMPSE can be used with standard IEEE models to search and highlight power grid objects such as generators, loads, overhead lines, etc. Additionally, it supports updating attributes and model export to integrate with GridLAB-D simulations.

Cybersecurity, power grid, visualization↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Analysis of the Electrical Grid for UAM

A wide range of challenges must be overcome to conduct Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations at scale with electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. This presentation is on an initial analysis of one potential infrastructure challenge for UAM: available electrical grid capacity. The success of UAM is dependent upon the availability of electricity, which will be increasingly impacted by the proliferation of ground electric vehicles over time. Under the best-case assumption that electricity can be transmitted and distributed as needed within each major interconnection (i.e., electrical grid), it is estimated that the maximum number of UAM aircraft that can charge simultaneously in the continental United States will decrease by 20% from 594,878 today to 475,177 in the year 2050.

electrical grid↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Analysis of the Electrical Grid for UAM

A wide range of challenges must be overcome to conduct Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations at scale with electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft as envisioned. This presentation is on an analysis of one potential infrastructure challenge for UAM: available electrical grid power capacity. The success of UAM depends on the availability of electricity, which will be increasingly impacted by the proliferation of ground electric vehicles over time. Under the best-case assumption that electricity can be transmitted and distributed as needed within each interconnection (i.e., electrical grid), it is estimated that the maximum number of UAM aircraft that can charge simultaneously in the continental United States will decrease by 20% from about 595 thousand in the year 2021 to about 475 thousand in the year 2050 due to the projected increase in ground electric vehicles.

electrical grid; urban air mobility; electric vehi↗
DOE OSTI2026

Large Load Integration - Task List and Overview

Large Load Integration Tasks: Task 1 – Workshops Support stakeholder engagement across industry to promote collaboration and identify solutions to challenges that will guide other work Task 2 – Ancillary Services Characterize different types of large loads to assess under what conditions they may be utilized to provide grid stability services Task 3 – Communications Explore the cybersecurity and communications infrastructure required to enable large loads to interface with grid operations to provide ancillary services Task 4 – Nuclear Integration Explore risks and methods for supporting large load energy needs with SMRs and incorporating them into the wider power system Task 5 – Decision Support and TA Provide support to stakeholders through the creation of planning tools and direct technical assistance.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2026

TASTI-GRID: a holistic view of Florida's grid resilience opportunities

In December of 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers updated Florida’s infrastructure grade to a ”C+” – reflecting overall investments in recent years. With the recommendation to further strengthen the electric grid and establish consistent building standards, extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and population in-migration are still compounding Florida’s grid vulnerabilities. Key challenges related to hurricane and other tropical & marine weather events are not unique to Florida. However, the state’s topography, location, demographics, and variation among rural and urban centers for tourism and industry, demonstrate the need for unique approaches to advancing critical infrastructure resilience, particularly for large concentrations of elderly residents or in areas of historic underinvestment. Florida’s grid asset advancements are credited with a reduction in average power outage durations. Yet, improvements since 2021 have set the stage for future resilience activities – as modernization efforts have greatly improved data collection – enabling better understanding of vulnerabilities and trends across counties and localities (particularly in Central Florida).

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2023

A Hierarchical Control Architecture: Utilization of Behind-the-Meter Appliances with Increased Visibility and Controllability

Optimal operations of distribution systems to enhance reliability and resiliency can be achieved if information with higher fidelity can be accessed from grid premise devices. This paper discusses a hierarchical control architecture that can introduce higher visibility and controllability by utilizing the estimated injection and absorption of different behind-the-meter controllable loads, and DERs, including EVs, within a premise. The acquired information is used to make control decisions for scheduling the premise appliances to reduce energy consumptions. The premise controller can also optimize the consumptions on a day-to-day basis in addition to taking input signals from the utility operators to support grid-service events (e.g., peak shaving). The entire control architecture is designed in a modular and scalable fashion that provides benefits to the utility from the reuse of existing infrastructure while creating opportunities for various grid services to be enabled by the operation of premise controllers.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Assurance by Design for Cyber Physical Data-Driven Systems

Currently, Cyber Physical Data-Driven Systems (CPDDS) employ machine learning for the classification, data fusion, and control of our nation’s infrastructure, such as the power grid, transportation networks (e.g., fuel distribution, air traffic control), and DoD long-duration collaborative autonomous platforms including unmanned underwater, ground, surface, space, and aerial systems. Many CPDDSs are system-of-systems that should be designed to communicate over disadvantaged networks. It is important to assure that the CPDDSs are resilient against physical and cyber threats by design. Additionally, their design should tolerate misclassification errors resulting from natural and/or adversarial distribution shifts within their data driven components. The all-domain nature of the problem of assuring the design of CPDDSs requires a multi-disciplinary perspective as outlined in this chapter.

Chikkagoudar, Satish↗
DOE OSTI2022

Challenges and Opportunities of Integrating Electric Vehicles in Electricity Distribution Systems

Increased charging needs from widespread adoption of battery electric vehicles (EVs) will impact electricity demand. This will likely require a combination of potentially costly distribution infrastructure upgrades and synergistic grid-transportation solutions such as managed charging and strategic charger placement. Fully implementing such strategic planning and control methods - including business models and mechanisms to engage and compensate consumers - can minimize or even eliminate required grid upgrades. Moreover, there are also opportunities for EV charging to support the grid by helping solve existing and emerging distribution system challenges associated with increasing distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar generation and battery energy storage. This paper reviews the potential impacts of EV charging on electricity distribution systems and describes methods from the literature to efficiently integrate EVs into distribution systems.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗