How EPRI Laboratories Deliver Confidence to a Rapidly Changing Industry

By Chris Warren

In the spring of 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a report detailing the potential benefits that several grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) could provide to improve the capacity of the transmission system. The critical need to bolster bulk grid capacity has been a topic of intense interest recently, thanks to the growing demand for electricity, the push to decarbonize, and the high cost and slow pace of permitting, financing, and building new transmission lines.

Put simply, GETs have attracted a lot of interest because they can be cost-effectively and rapidly deployed while new grid infrastructure is being built. However, as is the case with any new technology, there are questions about the performance and reliability of GETs, which include dynamic line ratings (DLR), advanced conductors, advanced power flow controllers, and transmission topology optimization. In some cases, GETs haven’t been deployed widely or for a sufficiently long time for utilities and grid operators to be fully confident that they can extract all the potential value from the technologies.

Fortunately, there are ways to build the confidence that utilities, regulators, and others need that relatively new technologies can perform as hoped before widescale deployment. For instance, EPRI Laboratories in Charlotte, North Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Lenox, Massachusetts, offer the testing capabilities and deep industry expertise needed to help the industry use, understand, and get comfortable with beneficial technologies before they are installed in the real world.

That’s exactly what happened with GETs. “When GETs really emerged as a priority about a year ago, people came to EPRI because we’ve been testing advanced conductors for more than a decade,” said Drew McGuire, director of transmission and substations R&D at EPRI. “So, when the industry needed to understand advanced conductors, we could raise our hand and say we’ve already done it. Here are the test results. We aren’t just responding quickly; we are ahead.”

And when it comes to GETs specifically, EPRI’s laboratories—including new, purpose-built test sites in Lenox, Massachusetts—are making investments in personnel and equipment to better understand the performance of advanced power flow controllers and the potential benefits of DLR.

Keeping Up with the Rapid Pace of Change

The emergence of interest in GETs is not an anomaly. These days, any discussion about the utility industry inevitably includes descriptors like transformation, transition, and rapid change. These assessments are not wrong. The ongoing shift of the power system to become more decentralized, digitized, and decarbonized involves an unprecedented level and pace of change. However, as the demand for electricity from transportation, heating, cooling, and industry increases, the goal of the industry to deliver reliable and safe energy remains the same.

Utilities and grid operators must manage immense and rapid change in generation and grid systems that, in many cases, are a century old. They must also reliably deliver electricity, increasingly from renewable and low-carbon sources. One of the most obvious manifestations of the change utilities must successfully navigate is the assessment and integration of new technologies. Deploying new technologies—or improved iterations of existing technologies and materials—inevitably requires robust testing to ensure they don’t introduce new risks that reduce grid reliability or raise safety concerns. EPRI laboratories can accelerate testing to close knowledge gaps and increase confidence in new technologies.

“The pace of change is accelerating. This means that new needs and new technologies are coming into the market all the time. Grid owners are in a position where they’re operating real transmission lines and real distribution lines that are serving load,” McGuire said. “But they simply don’t have the performance data or the experience to know if it’s the right time to deploy new technology or if it’s deployable at all. The labs can derisk technology so that the end users can apply it confidently and intelligently, adding value. That’s a key part of what the labs do.”

Building on a Foundation of Equipment and Expertise

The capacity to respond quickly or even anticipate industry needs is not something that emerged overnight. Years of continuous and meaningful investments in the labs have provided a foundation of capabilities enabling EPRI to address the industry’s wide range of opportunities and challenges.

“We strategically invest in state-of-the-art capabilities that provide a strong foundation that can be reused for multiple projects and also enables EPRI to be flexible and dynamic to respond to new testing needs, whether it’s asset management, cyber security, or DER (distributed energy resources),” said Matt Wakefield, director of information, communication, and cyber security (ICCS) at EPRI. “In Knoxville, we have the electrical infrastructure for performing a whole host of designs and tests on various types of power quality equipment to replicate any type of power quality scenario. And in my area, we have virtually every piece of equipment installed in North American substations, so we can replicate any utility substation environment and evaluate its safety and security against cyberattacks.”

Here’s a helpful way to bucket the high-level capabilities of EPRI’s laboratories.

The labs can help lead and advance both the industry and benefits to the public through engagement with codes, standards, and other regulatory bodies. “We have a lab for ultrasonic testing that was developed because utilities agreed they needed a single place to do testing for qualifications for technicians to meet regulatory standards,” said Michael Ruszkowski, director of plant support at EPRI. “Over the course of three decades, we’ve accumulated 700 different samples of different metals, different welds, and different weld overlays of dissimilar metals. People can come and get qualified at our site and because we have such a large sample, it allows us to have all different aspects of degradations that you would find in the field at a nuclear power plant.”

The ongoing and wide-ranging investments in cutting-edge equipment and facilities at EPRI’s laboratory facilities are an important differentiator, particularly compared to other more specialized labs. Equally important is that EPRI has also continued to make investments in expanding lab staff. This is particularly critical today because of the wave of retirements that are impacting the industry. “Good people are equally or more important than good equipment,” said John Shingledecker, a principal technical executive at EPRI. “We’re increasingly being asked to respond rapidly to industry challenges, whether it’s failure investigations or root cause analysis, because there is a knowledge gap in the industry, and our expert teams are filling that gap with unbiased assessment grounded in deep technical knowledge.”

A Collaborative Approach to Research

With so many new technologies and so much change impacting the utility industry, how do the labs prioritize their work? EPRI’s internal expertise and forward-looking research provide invaluable insights about emerging challenges, opportunities, and technologies. However, the labs’ work and the investments in equipment and people necessary to do rigorous testing are also guided by specific needs and gaps pinpointed by member utilities. “They will come to us and say, here’s a problem I’m having, or here’s a question that I need an answer to,” said McGuire. “Or this piece of equipment just failed in a substation; what can we learn?”

Inevitably, this results in the labs focusing on both emerging and existing technologies as well as the compatibility of new and old. Cybersecurity is a good example of how the two come together in the work of the labs. “On the innovation side, there are areas like evaluating artificial intelligence capabilities to detect attacks,” said Wakefield. “Then, on the other side of that are assets like digital relays that have been installed for years. How well are they protected against attacks, and what mitigations are needed because they don’t necessarily have the latest and most advanced defensive capabilities?”

While most of the work done at the labs is targeted at broad industry challenges and opportunities, individual member utilities can fund specific and targeted tests. But even if the labs pursue bespoke projects, the findings are still used to inform the entire industry. “We will do one-off projects,” said Shingledecker. “The learnings come back to EPRI and the industry. We can help with a specific issue, but then we can proliferate that knowledge, and the learnings will help drive future research.”

A Wide Breadth of Expertise

One of the hallmarks of the emerging power system is the erosion of traditional silos. As just one example, consider the growing importance of transmission and distribution system planners working together to ensure grid reliability and the smooth integration of distributed energy resources (DERs).

Managing the challenges and opportunities that arise with greater interdependence necessitates a holistic approach to research and testing. EPRI’s laboratory capabilities reflect its broad research expertise. This is unique. “From nuclear to generation, transmission, customer solutions, telecommunications, and cybersecurity, we’ve got the whole ecosystem covered among our labs,” said Wakefield. “There are other labs that have bigger capabilities, but they don’t have the same breadth.”

That breadth allows EPRI to leverage its labs to pursue combined, multi-stakeholder research projects that reflect utilities’ real-world challenges. For example, EPRI programs focused on distribution operations, DER integration, data connectivity, and cybersecurity have intersecting research and testing imperatives that are best pursued together. “We’ve established an ecosystem here from operations to asset management to telecommunications to data integration and cybersecurity that allows us to do combined research and training that leverages the same resources,” said Wakefield.

Arguably, though, the laboratories’ biggest differentiator flows from the simple fact that its work reflects EPRI’s core mission to serve society. “Other labs serve important functions to develop new products, educate students, and generate fundamental learnings,” said McGuire. “EPRI laboratories exist to achieve our public mission in an independent, unbiased way. That’s our motivation.”

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