Research seeks a green transformation of the electric grid

Plugging a phone into an outlet taps into the 140-year-old electrical grid developed by famous inventors Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Samuel Insull.

Today’s grid, called Grid 2.0, is a MacGyvered combination of historical innovations, modern computing, and sensing and monitoring technologies. Thousands of generators are linked together across the United States to power businesses and homes.

When President Joe Biden's administration passed Executive Order 14057, it established a climate goal to achieve carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.

To achieve that goal, today’s power grid will have to transform completely.

“The world is becoming more and more electrified,” said Richard Zhang ’98, the Hugh P. and Ethel C. Kelly professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “There’s a profound transformation ongoing today in how to generate, transport, store, and consume electrical energy, accelerated by climate change. This new transformation requires very different thinking and calls for numerous new technologies to be created and developed across the entire domain of the electrical infrastructure.”

Because alternative energy sources like wind and solar emit no carbon dioxide during production, they’re the obvious choice for reaching the clean energy reality – just not with our current grid. Grid 2.0 is unable to meet the growing demand for alternative energies, including the increasing usage of electric vehicles, meaning only one thing: It’s time for Grid 3.0.

Thinking green

Virginia Tech is positioned at the forefront of research on building Grid 3.0 through the Electrified Green Infrastructure Power Conversion lab (eGIPC), which is an expansion to the Center for Power Electronics space in the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington.  

The space was upgraded this spring and boasts a test bed with special capabilities for academic research and industry projects utilizing programmable emulators for alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) bulk grids and microgrids. 

The emulators are tools that mimic the behavior of real, full-scale power grids with diverse energy sources such as solar or wind farms, battery energy storage systems, and emerging and fast-growing electrical loads, including large data centers. The emulators create controlled and safe environments for researchers to invent and validate novel components, circuits, advanced control algorithms, and system architectures.

The test bed will support sustained and long-term research for high-, medium-, and low-voltage research for applications, including

• AC and DC microgrids, which are electrical grids designed for one specific area, such as a single building or even a small town, and have diverse energy sources and utility-scale energy storage
  
  
• Multi-terminal high-voltage direct current transmission, a technology that transmits electricity over long distances, to multiple locations, and is crucial for integration of renewable energy, such as offshore wind farms and solar farms
  
  
• Off-shore wind and solar farms, such as the future wind farms outside of New York and New Jersey that will power more than 700,000 homes
  
  
• Electric vehicle charging infrastructure, which includes at-home and public charging stations
  
  
• Green hydrogen production systems through electrolysis. Hydrogen’s natural state is gas, so it’s not easily accessible for use as a clean energy source. Using production systems, hydrogen can be produced for energy sources like fuel cells, which don’t emit greenhouse gasses.

Utilizing this one-of-a-kind testing facility, Center for Power Electronics faculty and students can conduct cutting-edge research needed for establishing Grid 3.0.

“The most exciting part about our research on electrified green infrastructure is the prospect of contributing to a carbon neutral world," said Haris Bin Ashraf, third-year electrical engineering Ph.D. student advised by Zhang. “My research focus is on creating the grid of the future with power electrics, specifically developing control methods that enable the formation of a 100 percent power electronics-based AC grid, which is super critical for achieving a renewable energy grid and carbon neutrality. The eGIPC expanded lab space will enable me to evaluate new control methods with real hardware.” 

Building the future electrical grid is more than individual activity. Researchers across the country will have to collaborate.

Calling for collaboration

“We need to work together to create the grid of the future because getting it wrong – the consequences are too big,” said Zhang. “The grid is evolving, but the question is, what innovations will be needed? What goals should we have in mind? And what ecosystem do we need to create to foster and accelerate innovation and impact?”

As part of the April Center for Power Electronics annual conference, experts from the Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Google, Georgia Tech Center for Distributed Energy, and many others came together to tackle those questions, share their expertise, and discuss global challenges and opportunities, such as

• Features of the modernized grid such as being reliable, resilient, sustainable, flexible, secure, and above all, affordable
• The Department of Energy's Energy Earthshots initiatives, which includes the Affordable Home Energy Shot, the goal to decrease resident energy costs by at least 20 percent within a decade and increase accessibility of home energy efficiency improvements for homeowners
• The future electric consumer, called the “prosumer,” who will not only use the grid but also actively produce energy, through renewable resources like solar or wind

Much like the original inception of the electrical grid, transforming the brainchild of Edison, Tesla, and Insull will take more than a day of conversation to create viable solutions. 

But it is a starting place.

“We’ve been going through evolution, but now I think we’re really at the beginning of a revolution,” said Zhang. “It’s exciting, with new opportunities to motivate us as researchers.”