Southeast Regional Consortium

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) are forming a Southeast Regional Consortium, with regional stakeholders including utilities, academia, regulatory agencies, and industry, focused on improving distribution system resiliency while increasing the concentration of distributed energy resources (DERs).   The enabling activity to the formation of this Consortium will be a workshop, jointly sponsored by ORNL and SRNL with invitations to multiple Southeast utilities, universities, equipment suppliers and regulatory agencies.

In addition, ORNL and SRNL will each complete testing of advanced sensing, communication, and controls to monitor the health of the distribution grid, increase system visibility during extreme events, and take action to mitigate system impacts.  SRNL, in close collaboration with UNCC, Duke Power and the Center for Advanced Power and Engineering Research (CAPER), will test how a combined terrestrial and space based wireless network can be utilized to allow for resilient grid sensing and control during routine and major network outages due to severe weather events and terrorist attacks (cyber and/or physical).  ORNL, in collaboration with the Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB), National Instruments, and SmartSenseCom will focus on developing and validating key distributed controls, sensing, and time sensitive data transfer technologies needed to improve power system resilience and efficiency and increase distributed generation concentration with the eventual goal of testing at the distribution system level.