The University of Connecticut was one of four institutions to receive a grant from the Department of Energy to support their offshore wind power development program.
According to a press release from UConn, the grant contributes $2.1 million to the project, which is expected to cost $3.7 million in total. The difference will be covered by industry partners such as Eversource, an energy company that partnered with UConn to create the Eversource Energy Center, which researches and develops technology for more reliable power.
“The project outcomes will be shared with the broader industry and offer new findings to stakeholders for accelerating offshore wind integration to achieve the United States’ ambitious 30 gigawatt offshore wind goal,” the press release said.
According to the press release, the main focus of the project is maximizing the grid capacity of the offshore wind farm with their current transmission lines.
“Investing in completely new transmission lines would be both extremely costly and time-consuming as well as creating regulatory challenges and potentially causing disruption to local communities,” the press release said.
The project looks to accomplish their goal by utilizing dynamic line rating sensors to monitor the transmission lines of an offshore wind farm. The sensors will collect data such as wind speed and the line’s temperature. This data will ideally be used to ensure that wind farms are consistently operating at their maximum safe capacity.
Professor Junbo Zhao, the principal investigator of the grant, explained to UConn Today that currently, grid operators tend to manage their systems conservatively “due to security and reliability margin reserves.”
“We want to monitor the real-time limits for all of those critical transmission corridors or transmission lines, and then based on that information, we can do optimized dispatch of the power flows through the circuits so that we are able to integrate more renewable energies securely and reliably without investing in new transmission lines,” Zhao said to UConn Today.
According to the press release, the sensors will be deployed along transmission lines in Massachusetts, near the “nation’s first utility-scale 800-megawatt offshore wind farm,” which is expected to come online in late 2023 or early 2024.
The other institutions that received the federal grants were Georgia Tech Research Corporation in Atlanta, NV Energy in Las Vegas and Pitch Aeronautics Inc. in Boise, Idaho. According to the Office of Electricity website, all of the projects involve dynamic line rating technology, among other developments.
The website says that the recipients of the grant are all performing research and development that will enable a smoother adoption of more sustainable systems throughout the energy sector.
“The technologies they deploy will help optimize infrastructure in existing rights of way,” according to the website. “They will also facilitate renewable resource interconnection and market access by improving the reliability and efficiency of power transfer.”
Emmanouil Anagnostou, the director of the Eversource Energy Center at UConn, said to UConn Today that this project could set a valuable precedent for other wind farms to further improve their own capacities.
“Since this is the nation’s first utility-scale, big offshore wind generation, if we demonstrate that this technology is going to work well, then developments in other regions – like the Mid-Atlantic or Gulf Coast or Western areas – they’re going to follow the same steps,” Anagnostou said.