In this task, Aidan Tuohy will provide an overview of some of the key recent activities in EPRI”s Transmission Operations and Planning R&D area. With changing resource mix, new loads and implications of extreme events all becoming more important for planning and operating the grid, EPRI has several key activities that can be discussed. This includes recent initiatives on resource adequacy, load forecasting and climate resilience, where EPRI is developing guidelines and tools to support grid operators and planners. The talk will also discuss the implications for large loads, particularly data centers, as well as efforts to enable flexibility from these loads. Finally, Artificial Intelligence is being envisioned as a tool that can support various elements of the grid, from supporting planning and protection studies, to control room of the future tools, and latest developments in this area will be provided.

Dr. Aidan Tuohy is the Director of EPRI’s Transmission Operations and Planning R&D Group, managing a portfolio of near and long-term research, thought leadership and applications, with a focus on supporting the reliable, resilient and affordable transition to a clean electricity system. He leads a team of over 75 individuals with subject matter expertise spanning long term planning, operations planning, real time operations, system protection and market design and operations. He joined EPRI in October 2010 and has worked on a range of renewable integration, resource adequacy and operational reliability projects at EPRI. Prior to joining EPRI, Dr. Tuohy worked as a consultant the International Energy Agency. He completed his doctoral degree at the University College Dublin Electricity Research Centre in 2009.He is on the board of ESIG, and also involved in NERC, IEEE, IEA, IEC and CIGRE activities.

As we know, power transformers are the most critical asset of the transmission network. Although highly reliable, they still can fail prematurely or ultimately retire at the end of their service life. In today’s design practices, transformers are tailored for a specific application and cannot change their configuration or replace each other unless identical. Additionally, they provide minimal support to the grid operation and therefore limit the grid flexibility and resiliency when facing severe conditions. In this presentation, we will introduce the concept of flexible power transformer and demonstrate how next generation of power transformers can aim beyond the single function of voltage transformation to become the power flow controllers of future grid networks. The flexible transformer concept will introduce for this first time a transformer with an online adjustable impedance. This concept might bring significant benefits for utility by offering a cost-effective solution to regulate power flow in the network and relieve transmission lines congestion bottlenecks, better matching local impedance requirements to adapt to evolving short-circuit currents and providing a universal spare to multiple units in a given fleet.

The presentation will also cover concepts of solid-state power transformers and discuss advantages, technical barriers, and roadmap for faster penetration into the grid.

Dr. Ndiaye joined GE Vernova (the former energy branch of GE) in 2013. He is currently a Senior principal engineer and a Mission Leader in the Electrification team of the Advanced Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. He has over 18 years of experience in power systems and high voltage engineering. His research includes power transformers, MVDC and HVDC grid architectures and grid integration of renewable energy resources. Prior to joining GE, Dr. Ndiaye was a consulting engineer in Cegertec (now Stantec) in Quebec, Canada working in grid integration and planning of smelter plants and high substations. Dr. Ndiaye is a professional engineer registered in the Ordre des Ingenieurs du Quebec, Canada and a member of CIGRE. He is the US National Committee representative of Subcommittee D1 – Material and Emerging Test Techniques

In this task, Curt Jawdy will share information about how TVA utilizes research and development to respond to an environment in which the grid changes rapidly. Topics to be presented are the changing grid; complexity, margin, and fragility factors for the grid; directions of TVA R&D to solve these problems; workforce needs; and TVA’s Innovation and Research Fellow program.

The presentation will also cover concepts of solid-state power transformers and discuss advantages, technical barriers, and roadmap for faster penetration into the grid.

Curt Jawdy leads the R&D function at TVA.  He oversees technical advancements across the breadth of TVA’s mission from generator to end consumer.  His focus is on enabling the organization to choose promising technologies well, trial them and prepare them for adoption by TVA.  Curt’s background is in modelling, particularly of water systems.  The similarity between water system modelling and electric system modelling made for an easy transition to leading the grid side.  Curt has been wanting to learn more about CURENT and is excited to speak at the 2025 Industry Conference.

The rapid increase of renewable penetration is an occurring reality in the New England power grid. The traditional operation and planning studies face significant challenges in modeling the uncertainties associated with the renewable resources. This talk discusses several thrusts of the research and development effort at the ISO New England, including modeling wind and solar forecast uncertainties using the theory of Copula, dynamic co-simulation of the transmission and distribution systems, and AI applications in grid read-time control and operation planning. Over the past years, the ISO New England has shared successful partnership relationship with the University of Tennessee in Knoxville through both the internship programs and faculty research collaboration. This talk intends to share some of the real-system challenges facing the industry today and inspire new ideas and innovative experiments towards solution.  

Mingguo Hong received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington in 1998. He is currently a principal analyst at the ISO New England in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Before he joined the ISO New England, he worked as a power systems engineer at GE Grid Solutions in Redmond, Washington and a principal market engineer at the Mid-continent Independent System Operator (MISO) in Carmel, Indiana. He also worked as an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His current research interests are in power system resilience, the electricity markets, and distributed energy resources and Machine Learning applications in power system operation.

The electric grid continues to evolve. The growing load, aging infrastructure, and diversity of generation push for electric grid technologies that can be robust against threats both natural and by nefarious actors. This keynote will discuss ongoing research in distribution system resilience at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This includes microgrids and networking microgrids and subsystem level resiliency improving technologies.

Michael Starke is an Electrical Engineering System Integrator and Architect at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has been at ORNL for over 15 years performing research in different areas of optimization, control, and communications in power systems. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Tennessee in 2004, 2006, and 2009 respectively. His research areas have been primarily focused on electric vehicle charging, energy storage, load control, and microgrids. In his most recent work, he has developed a systems integration package called CDAS-RT that works both in controller hardware in the loop platforms and hardware systems within the new GridC facility. These are being used to demonstrate AC and DC systems composed of energy storage, electric vehicles, and photovoltaic systems and microgrids.

NVIDIA is the leading accelerating computing company, providing a full stack of support to our customers including hardware, software, and networking from cloud to data center to edge computing. As a company, we have observed an increase in computational requirements globally, and we recognize the importance of energy efficiency to satisfy these requirements for our customers. Our efforts not only benefit our own operations, but they also enable us to collaborate with partners in the energy industry who leverage our technology to enhance their efficiency, reliability, and sustainability. Our technology allows our industry partners to leverage AI-driven solutions to perform predictive analysis, grid maintenance, and eventually developing autonomous microgrids for increased grid resiliency. Today, we will talk about our vision for a future where our technology plays a pivotal role in shaping a more efficient, sustainable, and resilient energy landscape.

Robbie Searles is a Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA on the NALA Supercomputing team. Robbie helps scientists in the United States Department of Energy and other federal research institutions leverage NVIDIA GPUs for their research by providing expertise on programming models, developer tools, optimization strategies, and performance analysis. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, where his research focused on high-level programming models and abstractions for heterogeneous HPC systems.