About

GRIDS – Grid Reliability Initiative utilizing Data Standardization

The GRIDS project is focused on improving reliability and resilience for the electric utility industry by improving interoperability between transmission and distribution assets by standardizing Distributed Energy Resource (“DER”) data for more efficient data exchange between increasingly complex circuits, systems, and equipment.

Motivation:

Transmission systems operators need more situational awareness of evolving distribution-level grid events to enable rapid detection of evolving threats, assess impacts, and drive operational activities at the transmission-level and beyond, as an understanding of transmission grid events is also very helpful for the Distribution grid operators.

High penetration of DERs in recent years increases demand for efficient DER data communication between Transmission Operators (“TOs”), Distribution Operators (“DOs”) and Independent System Operators (“ISOs”).

GRIDS Phase 1 Activities:

neighborhood view

  • GRIDS hosted a virtual workshop with several T&D utilities.
  • DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory partnered with electric utility industry stakeholders to identify use cases important to both transmission and distribution operators. Industry stakeholders then helped prioritize those use cases.
  • Top 2 use cases identified and developed in CIM standards, then reviewed by workshop participants to help with:
    1. Coordination of unplanned outages from Transmission to Distribution operations systems (impacts the 61968-3 Unplanned Outage Messaging standard)
    2. DER Response to Abnormal Conditions – when there are high impedance faults, especially in high penetration scenarios, systems can identify a line as down, but the line is still electrified (impacts IEC 61968-9, ‘End Device Control Messages’; IEC 61968-5, ‘DER Group Messages’; IEC 61968-3, ‘Unplanned Outage Message’; IEC 61968-8, ‘Interfaces for Customer Operations’)
  • Significant gaps that exist within the current communication processes at the T&D interface

 

GRIDS Phase 2:

  • Pilot implementation of outages use case with a pair of Transmission and Distribution utilities
  • Standards/Protocols landscape in Transmission and Distribution utilities
  • Research and implement new use cases relevant to electric vehicle (“EV”) data standardization
  • Standardized communication via Energy Emergency Alerts (“EEA”) and Flex Alerts
  • DER use case standardization using Vermont Electric Company (“VELCO”) data

 

Supplementary Materials