Made possible by the Chattanooga Gig, EPB is providing the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) with an ideal testbed for smart grid research.
With support provided by DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, an effort was launched in 2014 to advance the state of the power grid in Tennessee. Oak Ridge staff scientists, working closely with EPB, use their expertise to test new technologies, examine the use of microgrids, develop new analytics that will allow EPB to unlock the power of its smart grid data to improve operations, and use high-performance computing to perform modeling and simulations.
Through their partnership, ORNL and EPB are learning how to best apply sensors, controls, secure communications, and other technologies allowing a power grid to function more autonomously and reliably as it grows and becomes more complex.
