Cooperative Living Northern Virginia Electric • June 2016 • DOE Announces $220 Million for Upgrading the Nation’s Power Grid

The nation’s power grid has become a hot topic for politicians, engineers, and journalists. Knowing the grid needs to be updated and protected, the U.S. Department of Energy launched the Grid Modernization Multi-Year Program Plan in January. As part of this plan, DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz announced that DOE will award up to $220 million over three years — subject to congressional appropriations — to electric utilities and research groups for improving the “reliability, resiliency, and security” of the grid.

“Modernizing the U.S. electrical grid is essential to reducing carbon emissions, creating safeguards against attacks on our infrastructure, and keeping the lights on,” Moniz said. “This public-private partnership between our National Laboratories, industry, academia, and state and local government agencies will help us further strengthen our ongoing efforts to improve our electrical infrastructure so that it is prepared to respond to the nation’s energy needs for decades to come.”

The Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium involves 14 DOE national labs and dozens of electric industry, academia, and state and local government agency partners across the country. One of the partners is the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which represents NOVEC and more than 900 other consumer-owned electric cooperatives in the U.S. NRECA’s project will help utilities update their technology to improve grid resiliency, reduce power-outage frequency, and shorten restoration times.

NOVEC, being a leader, began modernizing its grid more than a decade ago. DOE propelled the effort when it gave NOVEC a $5 million matching grant in 2009.

“DOE’s grant allowed us to install remote-controlled devices at substations at a much faster pace and add more distribution-line devices than we had originally planned,” explains Jim Moxley, NOVEC’s senior vice president in charge of the $10 million smart-grid project. “The new devices continuously monitor power transformers, battery systems, protection controls, voltage, and power quality. They send data updates to system operators every five seconds, 365 days a year. They also send alerts that can help avoid power outages — often in time for system operators to avert outages by switching to alternate power feeds.”

Dan Swingle, interim vice president of NOVEC’s System Operations Center, says one feature alone — the independent phase trip — has reduced annual average outage time by nearly 6 percent. “In the past, when one phase on a power line experienced a fault all three phases went out. As a consequence, all customers served by that protective device lost power. With the independent phase trip, only the phase with the problem goes out. Therefore, only one-third of the customers receiving power from that line lose power instead of everyone.”

To measure overall reliability, electric utilities use the System Average Interruption Duration Index. The SAIDI records the annual average number of minutes power is off per customer. The fewer SAIDI minutes the better.

“NOVEC’s SAIDI minutes from 2005 through 2010 averaged 74 minutes, which was exceptional in our industry,” Swingle says. “But our five-year SAIDI average from 2011 through 2015 dropped to 57 minutes — nearly a 23-percent reliability improvement — much of which can be attributed to the smart-grid devices.”

NOVEC’s 260-mile fiber-optic network makes the Co-op more reliable. NOVEC is the only electric cooperative in Virginia with its own fiber-optic network.

“We were a fiber-optic pioneer in the utility industry when we started developing our network in 1995,” notes Moxley. “Today it’s an integral part of our modernized grid.”