Di180425013 56 I8446 56 I8621
EES is studying interaction between wind turbines and atmospheric boundary layer flows. A new numerical technique for modeling wind turbine blades in atmospheric turbulent flow, WindBlade, has been developed and patented, leveraging the team’s R&D 100 winning atmospheric computational fluid dynamics model, HIGRAD/FIRETEC.

In recent years, the electric power grid and other critical energy systems have become increasingly complicated, uncertain, interconnected, and dynamic. These challenges have been driven by factors like new technology deployments, evolving regulatory policies, changing market environments, and many others. In spite of this additional complexity, the power grid industry must continue to provide reliable, resilient, secure, and flexible delivery of power to meet the demands of modern social-economic systems.

As a result, the industry and regulators need advanced tools which will allow them to make better use of the vast amounts of information which can help them handle the complexity of modern energy systems and support their planning and decision making.

To address this need, the Office of Electricity in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has developed and supported a program entitled Advanced Grid Modeling (AGM). The AGM Program is designed to fund research in cutting edge technologies which advances the state-of-the-art in power system planning, operations, and analysis tools.  At Los Alamos National Laboratory, research teams (for example, the Advanced Network Science Initiative) are supporting the AGM program through the development of novel informational science techniques from the fields of optimization, control, machine learning, and statistics that are used to solve some of the most challenging problems faced by the power industry today and in the future.

 

Goals of LANL’s AGM Teams

  • To provide DOE theoretical and algorithm development for complex energy infrastructure optimization and control problems
  • Provide third-party, independent, science-based input into complex problems of national concern
  • Use scientific analysis to turn down the noise around complex problems

The LANL AGM team consist of experts from physics, statistical physics, power engineering, applied mathematics, statistics, optimization, computer science, machine learning, chemical engineering, control theory, geospatial analysis, software development, and cloud computing.

 

Programmatic Highlights

  • Out of the Dark: 1663 article on how LANL Scientists strategies best to keep the lights on with modern and secure national power grid
  • Severe Contingency Solver: A 2019 R&D 100 award winner focused on software developed to analyze the impact of extreme events on power grids (press release, teaser video, overview video)

Related Articles