5/8/2013 9:00:00 AM ITI Staff
Written by ITI Staff
The Illinois Center for a Smarter Electric Grid (ICSEG) at ITI is leading the field in creating a smarter and more secure electric grid. ICSEG works to provide services to analyze and assess information technology and the control aspects of the smart grid systems, including micro grids and distributed energy resources.
Led by Principal Investigator Tom Overbye and Director Alfonso Valdes, ICSEG is working with new smart grid technologies, tools, system configurations and techniques to determine how they could be used in trustworthy configurations. The Center conducts tests to confirm that these systems are more cost-effective and a significant improvement upon currently used systems.
The electric power industry is changing and adding a lot more control and cyber enabled monitoring equipment into it, Overbye said. We work to validate and check to ensure the equipment and grid as a whole are working as we expect it to work.
ICSEG is a five-year project that began in 2010 and operates within ITI, located at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. It is funded through a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Through ICSEG, we have had the opportunity to interact with a wide spectrum of the electric utility industry, including investor owned utilities, rural electric cooperatives, municipal utilities and manufacturers, Valdes said. ICSEG is in a key position to help these entities evaluate candidate technologies before adoption.
Overbye added that ICSEG's goal is to promote economic opportunity in Illinois and that they're working toward making Illinois a center for the smart grid in various aspects.
Smart grid equipment suppliers, integrators and electric utilities are beginning to use ICSEG as a way of validating their design systems before deploying the systems. ICSEG projects focus on high voltage electric grid validation issues, validation of improved models for the electric load, validation of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and cyber security aspects of the smart grid.
Currently, ICSEG has been actively involved in developing analysis tools to help utilities better understand the significance geomagnetic disturbances (GMD) can have on the electric grid. A GMD occurs when an eruption on the sun causes charged particulars to be sent toward earth. These particles interact with the earth's magnetic field and cause problems with the power grid. ICSEG is collaborating with Illinois utility companies, such as Commonwealth Edison, and utilities nationwide to combat this problem.
Additionally, ICSEG has built a photovoltaic (PV) validation facility on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, where solar panels will be set up to test various inverter and control technologies and determine how efficient they are.
This will help us to validate the performance of the inverters that are a crucial component of any utility or residential scale PV system, Overbye said. It will also contribute to our understanding of the growing challenges associated with the integration of large amounts of renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar PV, into the grid.
The center played a key role in field validation of NetAPT within the Illinois electric cooperatives and other utilities. NetAPT helps utilities map paths to critical cyber assets in grid systems and has proven to be a valuable security assessment and audit tool. While largely developed under the DOE-funded TCIPG project, much of the validation activity was supported under ICSEG. NetAPT is now the key technology for Network Perception, a smart-up company focused on the validation of the cyber security of electric utility computer systems, led by CSL Director Bill Sanders and ITI Director David Nicol.
Since its inception, ICSEG has been active in the electric utility industry, taking on projects that are of interest locally and nationwide.
We are excited about our projects and are quite optimistic about the future, Overbye said. We think ICSEG will play a great role in helping create a smarter electric grid.