From Our Blogs

Mission-critical commercial and military applications have extremely high uptime requirements and tight deployment space constraints. Advanced small nuclear reactors, packaged as compact units and deployed in microgrids, present a tantalizing option to meet these constraints and advance many of our nation’s priorities.

Microgrids offer a promising solution to enable the fast, reliable, and affordable build-out of data centers with shorter timelines relative to distribution/transmission grid expansion.

Microgrids have emerged as a promising part of the solution to the challenges of increasing electricity costs, power outages and increasing loads.

The power grid needs innovative ways to add additional energy production and control capabilities to the power system. The Office of Electricity is advancing one such approach with microgrid systems.

37 homes at The Medley at Southshore Bay in Tampa kept the lights on during Hurricane Ian in Florida. Their resilience was bolstered by a microgrid.

As artificial intelligence (AI) expands rapidly, large-scale data centers are becoming one of the largest and most dynamic classes of new electric loads. Unlike regular data centers with relatively constant demands for power, AI training centers use thousands of specialized computer chips that work together in tightly coordinated cycles.

One year ago, the Office of Electricity’s Grid Storage Launchpad was a new building full of sparkling new laboratories with new, unused equipment. Today, the 93,000-square-foot facility is bustling with researchers who are working to develop robust, affordable energy storage solutions to help bolster the nation’s electricity grid.

The Office of Electricity has announced $8 million in funding and technical assistance through its Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership (C-MAP) program. The new projects will reach 35 towns and villages.

Like many university campuses around the country, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) campus uses a microgrid to provide power to its facilities.

The blog describes a new software tool developed by PNNL and funded by OE that streamlines the power plant evaluation process.