Milestone In Power Grid Optimization On World’s First Exascale Supercomputer
Researchers were able to determine safe and cost-optimal power grid setpoints over 100,000 possible grid failures and weather scenarios in just 20 minutes.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL): In the largest simulation of its kind to date, Oak Ridge Lab's Frontier allowed researchers to determine safe and cost-optimal power grid setpoints over 100,000 possible grid failures and weather scenarios in just 20 minutes.
Ensuring the nation’s electrical power grid can function with limited disruptions in the event of a natural disaster, catastrophic weather or a manmade attack is a key national security challenge.
Compounding the challenge of grid management is the increasing amount of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind that are continually added to the grid, and the fact that solar panels and other means of distributed power generation are hidden to grid operators.
To advance the modeling and computational techniques needed to develop more efficient grid-control strategies under emergency scenarios, a multi-institutional team has used a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-developed software capable of optimizing the grid’s response to potential disruption events under different weather scenarios, on Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)’s Frontier supercomputer.