Dive Brief:
- The Electric Reliability Council of Texas announced Tuesday it has launched a new grid transformation initiative aimed at improving industry collaboration through expanded shared research and technology prototyping.
- Technology initiatives of the Grid Research, Innovation, and Transformation, or GRIT, program will focus on smart controls for distributed energy resources, machine learning models for optimal power flows, improvements to large load modeling and 11 other areas.
- “As the ERCOT grid continues to rapidly evolve, we are seeing greater interest from industry and academia to collaborate on new tools and innovative technologies,” ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
ERCOT serves most of Texas, where data centers and industrial expansion are rapidly driving electricity demand higher. The grid operator says 70.5 GW of new load could be interconnected to the system by 2028, and it is looking to use a new generation of power system tools to help accommodate the demand.
The GRIT initiative will help to increase focus on “innovation, transformation, and collaboration,” the statement says, with a three-pronged approach: through grid transformation initiatives, a new Research and Innovation Partnership Engagement program and ERCOT’s annual innovation summit, which occurred in May this year.
RIPE is “focused on market-ready technologies that have potential for grid-wide deployment,” according to the program web site. “The program is not about testing minor improvements in existing technology, data requests for research or early-stage development, or technologies with no clear merits for grid reliability, operations, or markets.”
The GRIT web site already offers white papers on artificial intelligence, DER operational data and other topics on grid operations.
“As the depth of information and industry collaboration evolves, we will continue to enhance the GRIT webpages to create a dynamic and valuable resource for the broader industry,” said Venkat Tirupati, ERCOT vice president of DevOps and grid transformation.
