This project, led by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), will provide a platform for co-optimization of wind plant performance that includes operational modes characterized under WETO’s Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e) initiative. Some of the modes include minimizing wake losses, wind plant operation based on maximizing value streams for grid services, and reduction of wind turbine operation and maintenance (O&M) for different grid service operating modes. This will provide a more complete capability for wind plant optimization.

DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and National Renewable Energy Laboratory will develop and validate control designs that allow turbines to operate in a collaborative fashion and alongside a 50-kW grid-connected battery using capabilities at Sandia’s Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility.

Power electronics experience interactions that disrupt power production, potentially causing physical damage to the components of the turbine or financial losses due to downtime. This project will develop a framework that utilities and transmission system operators can use to inform the way wind plants operate to mitigate power electronics disruptions.

This NREL-led project will investigate the theory, implement it in hardware, and validate the Virtual Synchronous Generator Wind Power Plant (WindVSG) concept by combining the advantages of modern dynamic inverter technologies with static, dynamic, and transient electromechanical properties of synchronous machines. NREL will demonstrate how to control the inverters of wind turbine generators and battery energy storage, so individually and combined they act like a conventional synchronous machine-based power plant. The project will develop and validate controls to convert utility-scale wind power plants into dispatchable and flexible sources with characteristics of synchronous machine-based generators at any time scale.

A collaboration between DOE, its National Laboratories, and industry, the NAERM initiative will develop a comprehensive resilience modeling system for the North American energy sector infrastructure, which includes the United States and portions of Canada and Mexico. NAERM provides for rigorous quantitative assessment, prediction, and improvement of national-scale energy planning, as well as real-time situational awareness capabilities. This unique capability will ensure reliable and resilient energy delivery across multiple sectors, such as telecommunications, water, and natural gas, spanning multiple organizations and authorities, while considering a range of large-scale, emerging threats.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in large-scale transmission planning. The Interconnection Seams Study was a GMLC project using current tools to assess the benefits of increasing connectivity between the Eastern and Western Interconnections of the national electricity grid. This project will build upon that work, refining methods and data parameterization for improved modeling of transmission congestion within capacity planning tools and grid operations models.

This project, led by DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL), will fully develop a DLR forecasting application capable of providing intra-day, next-day, and longer-term transmission line rating estimates for a networked transmission system. In direct partnership with NOAA, and in collaboration with industry partners like WindSim Americas, LineVision, Lindsey Manufacturing, and others, INL will use the tools and information developed under this project to inform other research efforts looking specifically at the weather forecast component of DLR and the economic and resilience impacts of using weather-based DLR enhanced with NOAA-supported weather forecasts and computational fluid dynamics.

The North American Renewable Integration Study, led by NREL, evaluated four scenarios for North American power systems through 2050, focusing on the effects of various renewable technology cost trajectories, emission constraints, demand growth, and outcomes. DOE and Natural Resources Canada released national perspective reports in 2021.

Key findings are:

• There are multiple combinations of electricity generation, transmission, and demand that can result in 80% carbon reduction by 2050. 
• The future low-carbon system can balance supply and demand across a wide range of future conditions, with all generation and storage technologies contributing to resource adequacy.  
• Operational flexibility comes from transmission, electricity storage, and flexible operation of all generator types, including hydropower, wind, solar, and thermal generation. 
• While carbon targets can be achieved with conservative assumptions about the cost of wind and solar, steeper cost reduction of these technologies can lead to a faster and less costly transition to a low-carbon electricity grid. 
• Regional and international cooperation on electricity transmission, as envisioned by the study, can provide significant net system economic benefits through 2050.

This GMLC project will demonstrate a fully operational, scalable, multi-MW FlexPower wind/solar/energy storage hybrid power plant with provision for a full set of reliability and resiliency services at NREL’s Flatirons Campus.

The Roadmap for Wind Cybersecurity outlines the increasing challenges of cyber threats to the wind industry, its technologies, and control systems and presents a framework of activities and best practices that the wind industry can use to improve its cybersecurity.

Funded by WETO, the Roadmap features written contributions from authors at DOE’s National Laboratories and is intended to:

• Raise wind industry awareness of increasing cyber threats and vulnerabilities to wind technologies and industrial control systems
• Lay out a time-phased framework for addressing such weaknesses in the near-, mid-, and long-term
• Illuminate best practices that apply to the wind industry
• Identify research needs, gaps, and opportunities that might advance technology and strengthen protections
• Inform future R&D investments in this area.

Although specific to wind, the Roadmap’s strategies are likely applicable to other forms of energy and industrial control systems. 

This project, led by DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and Idaho National Laboratory, will support the WETO Cybersecurity Roadmap to help secure wind energy technologies by enhancing approaches to harden wind communication networks and by constructing intrusion detection systems. These techniques will be shared broadly with the wind industry to harden communication systems to cyberattacks and detect when adversarial action is taking place, leading to informed response and recovery efforts.

The GMLC project team will use machine learning techniques for deep analysis of reverse-engineered malware. This will enable similarity analysis and prediction on malware evolution for defense actions.

In this GMLC project, NREL will work with the Electric Power Research Institute and John Hopkins University to establish new best practices and methodologies for independent system operator (ISO)/regional transmission organization (RTO) power system operations and planning. The technical tool methodologies and analytical outcomes will be disseminated through workshops with ISO/RTO staff and stakeholders, written reports, webinars, and conference/workshop presentations.

Wind-grid Integration stakeholder engagement activities focus on disseminating key results from NREL analysis to regulators, policy makers, utilities, and the power system industry. This helps ensure that study results are made available to the industry and stakeholders so that they are well-informed to leverage the latest research. One primary focus is continued involvement and support for the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG, formerly known as the Utility Variable Generation Integration Group or UVIG). The Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Literature Review and Gaps Analysis, published in October 2021, summarizes publicly available transmission analyses along the Atlantic Coast, as well as gaps in existing analyses in order to improve understanding of offshore wind transmission options to meet the national goal to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030.