Advancing Energy Management with ORNL's Grid Research Innovation and Development Center

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Grid Research Innovation and Development Center (GRID-C) uses the laboratory’s electric grid to prove innovations for smooth transmission to industry with minimal risk.

ORNL basically functions as its own utility, with power generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority supplying a campus including two high-energy neutron research facilities. The infrastructure helps integrate advances in electricity distribution. 

Research starts at the GRID-C technology development center on ORNL’s nearby Hardin Valley Campus. The center hosts laboratories for large-scale grid simulation and for designing technologies that can be tested with real hardware up to 13,800 volts. By adding field validation in a section of the ORNL campus grid, GRID-C helps integrate innovations into systems with real loads, sensors, energy sources and energy storage.

One of the technologies being validated within this field-testing site is a grid management platform built around coordinated resource hubs, or clusters of resources working together to meet utility needs. Developed in GRID-C and expanded over the last four years, the platform streamlines equipment energy management, communication and controls.

As consumer loads increase, controlling five hubs instead of 50 individual resources reduces the computing power required to operate the system, reducing costs while enabling more responsive localized control. The layered, automated controls increase operating efficiency and stabilize the grid by solving power quality problems at the source before they can spread.

A utility or industrial facility can customize the hub platform to achieve specific goals, such as reducing power costs or providing consistent power flow. The technology helps the components of the energy delivery system work together at all levels. With this approach, residential customers are allowed to preprogram home energy use and generation, helping save money as electricity prices fluctuate throughout the day.

The GRID-C field testing network operates at the edge of the ORNL grid, linked by a single connection so it can be isolated from the campus network and function as a self-contained microgrid. Fluctuations in voltage and power quality are hard to predict and simulate in a lab, thus, the real-world testing ensures innovations benefit customers with the least reliable electricity service.

Industry partners are allowed to use ORNL’s field testing capability to understand the impacts of new technologies, such as ORNL-developed power electronics. They can evaluate their own innovations, before launching products or methods to customers in the wider grid.

The ORNL grid architecture and control platform under testing phase is part of a collaboration with a utility planning to deploy it in the company’s own test facility in 2027.

“Although you can emulate resources in the lab, there’s always the possibility of overlooking something or discovering a characteristic of the system you didn’t expect,” said Steven Campbell, technical lead for the GRID-C field testing expansion. “By tying into actual energy storage, local generation and the grid, you can solve those challenges before moving a technology to a utility system.”

Both the research and capability expansion in GRID-C are funded by the DOE Office of Electricity. UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the major challenges.