DOE Selects Utilities to Participate in the Utility and Grid Operator Technical Assistance Program

The Department of Energy (DOE) has selected utilities to participate in the Utility and Grid Operator Technical Assistance program, which is designed to equip utilities and grid operators with the expertise and resources required to build the reliable, resilient, and secure grids for meeting the nation's growing energy demand.

The program is introduced by the DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Grid Deployment Office and managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory with support from Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The program offers three tracks:

• Key Assist, Interconnection Assistance, and rolling technical assistance. Key Assist provides utilities with up to $1 million of comprehensive technical assistance, including access to facilities such as NREL's Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES), to navigate complex grid integration challenges.
• Interconnection Assistance supports transmission providers and distribution utilities with between $100,000 and $150,000 to focus on short term interconnection needs.
• Rolling technical assistance provides utilities and grid operators with up to 100 hours of subject matter expertise

Key Assist Participants

• North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives (NCEC) is seeking technical assistance to expand the uses of distribute energy resources (DERs) installed on Distribution Cooperative circuits throughout the state to improve energy reliability and resilience in response to outages like those caused by Hurricane Helene in the summer of 2024. Key Assist will provide NCEC with tools to model DER performance during long duration system outages across the state’s unique topologies, protection philosophies, and DER interconnection requirements. This technical assistance will also enable NCEC to develop consistent design and control approaches for DERs and inform future investment decisions.
• Vermont Electric Cooperative (VEC) is seeking to improve load forecasting and DER integration. Specifically, VEC looks for support building gross and net load profiles over long-term adoption scenarios for all utility circuits, along with their DER composition. In addition, VEC intends to model aggregated gross and net load profiles to determine impacts of its DER forecasts on The Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) transmission system.
• Puget Sound Energy (PSE) is looking to develop definitions, metrics, and successful practices for energy affordability and public participation in the utility's practices, services, and investments. The project objectives include conducting research and stakeholder engagement; developing guidance for system-wide planning, operations, and evaluation; and providing utilities with direct technical assistance with future planning.
• Guam Power Authority (GPA) is seeking technical assistance to support the planning and deployment of vehicle-grid integration (VGI) technologies. GPA’s goal through this technical assistance is to integrate electric vehicles (EVs) and deploy chargers while ensuring grid reliability, optimizing energy usage, and delivering sustainable, cost-effective solutions.
• Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA) is seeking technical assistance with developing resource adequacy models, metrics, and performing analysis to minimize the risks of rolling blackouts in the winter months. The technical assistance will include the use of grid operations modeling tools to inform a resource adequacy study with an evaluation of solutions for limiting the risk of rolling blackouts.

Interconnection Assistance Participants

• Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA) is revising and formalizing its interconnection process and standards and seeking assistance with reviewing and revising interconnection procedures, studies, and standards. Interconnection Assistance will support GVEA with developing a FERC queue/cluster process, reviewing interconnection studies, methods, and criteria, and determining best practices on IEEE 2800 adoption.
• Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) has a complex generation facility planning model technical review process which validates the planning model based on performance standards. HECO seeks technical assistance tuning and validating its inverter-based resource (IBR) project models to reduce the time spent during interconnection studies to reach system-level dynamic stability performance targets. Technical assistance may provide an isolated, real-world system model based on HECO's system to provide future project developers a platform to use a real inverter to identify the best control settings for planning models prior to the interconnection studies.

Through tailored technical assistance, expert guidance, and access to the vast resources at NREL and other labs, the program will help the utilities overcome technical and financial hurdles.