Technology Licensing Opportunity - This is not a procurement. MASTERI Modeling And Simulation for Targeted Electrical Resilience Improvements Opportunity: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), managed and operated by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC (BEA), is offering the opportunity to enter into a license and/or collaborative research agreement to commercialize the MASTERI technology. Background: Modern society is increasingly dependent on electrical power delivery. As the complexity of the electrical grid and frequency of power outages increase, combined with the impact of increasing costs and delivery time for critical components on repairs and modernization, new methodologies are needed to identify the most critical weak points of a power grid system. Current approaches for evaluating grid resilience do not adequately assess and prioritize investments and improvements based on the need for developing greater resilience. Description: To address the need for identifying critical vulnerabilities to improve grid resilience, researchers at INL have developed a new method that combines power flow simulations, probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), and adaptive capacity resilience metrics to create an information flow that provides a more comprehensive picture of the most critical threat scenarios and their possible variants. Power flow simulations can agnostically determine what super components failure or combinations of super components failures result in a system failure. This information can then be entered into a PRA software to determine the most likely scenarios to occur under a variety of weather conditions and most likely components to experience failure. Utilizing the information from the power flow contingency analysis and the PRA software to inform resilience tools, a deeper dive into other pertinent system sensitivities not inherently obvious from the PRA or power flow contingency analysis may also be explored. Applications: MASTERI will be of most interest to power utility companies who, at a minimum, manage a transmission or distribution grid. Advantages: This new method provides a more complete picture of vulnerabilities in the electric grid compared to current methods. Power flow simulations provide information on what component combinations may result in a system failure, probabilistic risk assessment methods are able to translate power flow information into likelihood of occurrence, as well as rank individual components in terms of criticality to coherent operations, and resilient tools may quantify the system margin to maneuver out of a critical state or its capacity to endure additional disturbances. Impact: The combination of these tools could be used by utilities to quickly find relevant contingencies needed for study when dealing with a much larger and more complex electrical grid system as well as gain valuable information on the likelihood these scenarios will occur. This could have a significant impact on security and reliability, which in turn could result in cost savings by predicting potential failures ahead of time and streamlining decision making. MASTERI will also provide time savings by providing a statistically and resilience metric based ranking on what components of a system are most important to repair or replace. Development: This technology is currently in the proof-of-concept stage. Analytical and experimental critical function and/or characteristic has been proven in laboratory. INL has used this method to evaluate some standard IEEE power grid configurations. IP Status: Patent Application No. PCT/US19/4253, “A Computer-Aided Technique for Assessing Infrastructure Reliability and Resilience and Related Systems, Methods, and Devices.” INL is seeking to license the above intellectual property to a company with a demonstrated ability to bring such inventions to the market. Exclusive rights in defined fields of use may be available. Please visit Technology Deployment’s website at https://inl.gov/inl-initiatives/technology-deployment for more information on working with INL and the industrial partnering and technology transfer process. Companies interested in learning more about this licensing opportunity should contact Jon Cook at
[email protected].