REORG Controls Create Cellular, Not Centralized, Power Grid Resilience (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video REORG Controls Create Cellular, Not Centralized, Power Grid Resilience.

This video outlines how the REORG tool can help build more resilient grid systems.

[Music plays]

[Text on screen: REORG: Brings Adaptive and Distributed Grid Recovery to Western Colorado]

>>Bryan Hannegan, President and CEO of Holy Cross Energy: The Lake Christine Fire was a 12,500-acre wildfire that broke out a couple of days before July 4, 2018.

[Nighttime footage shows the Lake Christine Fire burning along a mountainside.]

>>Hannegan: The area in which it started was between a transmission substation and a distribution substation. So it was a very critical portion of our system.

From the Basalt substation that we own, there's only one line that connects up to Aspen. If that line was compromised, which it nearly was, it was going to be a rough day for the thousands of people that were in the upper Roaring Fork Valley on that holiday week.

Where would we have been as a society if we had lost that transmission service? We wouldn't have been able to treat the water. The cell phone towers would've run out of battery. There would've been no FAA control tower at the airport. We wouldn't have had radio communications for the first responders and the public service. We wouldn't have been able to pump gasoline to fill up cars to get people out of the valley.

[Images show communications infrastructure and other systems that depend on electricity.]

>>Hannegan: And so that got us thinking, OK, in the event that our network—our grid—is compromised, what's our Plan B? And that's where REORG came in.

[A graphic illustrates a Western Colorado community divided into interconnected local grid areas.]

>>Hannegan: REORG offers us the opportunity, at least, to think about a future where we can restore more people more quickly, more function more quickly.

It's an all-hazards approach, where you're thinking about your local communities, particularly in rural areas, as these hubs of energy supply and demand.

Rooftop solar, community solar, community battery, large loads that might have their own generation behind the meter. This kind of core of a grid within a grid. How might you operate Grid A in Community A, networked to Grid B in Community B?

[A map of Western Colorado illustrates separate community grid cells, a control center, and a disruption to the larger network. The graphic demonstrates how the local grids can continue operating when communication across the disrupted portion of the system is unavailable.]

>>Hannegan: We can't rely on data crossing the disruption, getting back to our control room, and sending signals back out. So we need some measure of distributed and potentially autonomous control.

This is increasingly a digital grid, and we need more digital control over it.

Architecture that we're pursuing as part of REORG really opens up a higher level of service, which is what we're all about.

We are thrilled that we've had the opportunity to work with the laboratory and its facilities. The technologies and the knowledge that we gained in this project can make their way into the next round of products that come out as sort of the standard operating system for the distribution grid in the future.

And that means it's not just good for us, but it's good for anybody running an electric grid.

[National Laboratory of the Rockies logo]

[Music stops]