image: Yilu Liu conducts research in her power grid lab at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Credit: University of Tennessee
University of Tennessee, Knoxville-ORNL Governor’s Chair Professor for Power Grids Yilu Liu has won her fifth R&D 100 Award in the last six years. For more than six decades, the R&D Awards have served as the most prestigious worldwide science and innovation competition that recognizes new commercial products, technologies, and materials for their technological significance that are available for sale or license.
Liu’s most recent award recognizes the Universal GridEdge Analyzer (UGA), which is a real-time, highly accurate, and GPS-synchronized power grid monitoring device used at distribution level that can help improve the security and resilience of the nation’s energy infrastructure.
The UGA enhances the situational awareness capabilities for electric power grid operators, end-users, and researchers, allowing them to access the health of the power grid in real time on their mobile devices.
The UGA is an updated version of past grid monitoring devices Liu has developed over her 20 years in the grid monitoring field. It’s the first design made entirely at the University of Tennessee, which makes it more cost efficient. The UGA has added features that can process more information to keep up with faster power electronic devices of the modern age.
“Many new power electronics connected grid components like PV, wind, battery storage and large data center loads could switch at extremely high frequency. They can maneuver very fast, and we need higher frequency or higher resolution monitors, and that’s what this new one is shooting for,” Liu said. “The new device will have much broader features and sampling at much faster speed and also offer a lot more variety of information. It probably offers 10 times more information.”
Important Tool for Increased Demand
The nation’s electrical power grid is experiencing increased demand with AI data centers and advanced manufacturing. In a recent report, the Department of Energy projected the magnitude and speed of anticipated load growth cannot be met with existing approaches to load addition and grid management.
The report stated, “At a minimum, modern methods of evaluating resource adequacy need to incorporate frequency, magnitude, and duration of power outages, move beyond exclusively analyzing peak load time periods, and develop integrated models to enable proper analysis of increasing reliance on neighboring grids.”
The uniqueness of the United States’ power grid makes the creation of the UGA important. The US grid is divided into three major regions: the Western Interconnection, the Texas Interconnected system, and the Eastern Interconnection, which operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains.
The Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) monitors the West, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) monitors Texas, and the East region is made up of individual utility companies with multiple regional reliability councils.
“There is not a central view of what’s happening in the grid, but they’re all connected together. So, the UGA allows the overall view of the entire east,” Liu said. “Of course, we also have monitors in the WACC, ERCOT, and worldwide. But the fundamental advantage is it gives us a very direct, real-time view of what’s going on in the East. Every utility has a visibility of their own territory, but not necessarily to the other parts of the grid, which is a majority.”
The UGAs help keep an eye on the grids to ensure consistent load sharing, frequency regulation, and voltage control, ensuring grid stability and minimizing disruptions.
“If there’s a disturbance, like a dropped data center or a generator that tripped up, how is the grid going to respond?” Liu said. “If the system is lighter in terms of less synchronous machines, it’s going to respond more violently, so that gives us the need to know how it responds and how to deal with any fast response.”
Teamwide Recognition
The other researcher scientists and graduate students at UT who have been instrumental in the UGA development are Wayne Yu, Yuru “Ori” Wu, Biao Sun, and Clay Yang. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a co-developer for the UGA.
“This work is a joint effort, as are many of the major research projects,” Liu said. “I would like to credit this ability to set up this partnership with ORNL, which has worked wonderfully for many of us.”
The R&D 100 award ceremony is scheduled for November 20, at the Marriott at McDowell Mountains in Scottsdale, Arizona. Rather than attending in person, Liu sends one of her students to accept the award each year.
“It’s such an excitement for them. Usually, it’s the first time for them, and I think it helped their career quite a bit,” she said. “And to a large degree, it’s their work, their development, so it makes sense for them to go.”