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Contract Opportunity

SOFTWARE LICENSING OPPORTUNITY

Resilience of Microgrids with Adaptive Capacity and Inertia (ReMAIn)

A new software tool that allows grid operators and planners to proactively measure resiliency and prepare for future outages.

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 ReMAIn. This technology transfer opportunity is part of a dedicated effort to convert government-funded research into job opportunities, businesses and ultimately an improved way of life for the American people.

Overview: Power outages have become more common with the rise in extreme weather patterns due to climate change. As the frequency of outages rises, so does the negative economic impact of those outages. The modernization of the power grid and adoption of microgrids and high penetration of distributed generation such as wind and solar have the potential to reduce the number and length of time of these power outages. Resilience is an important part of that increased reliability goal. The concept of resilience is relatively new, where high level definitions exist but the research and even demonstration of the benefit is not widely accepted. These definitions often refer to the ability of the system to plan, recognize and adapt to damaging storms and cyber-attacks. One of the issues with resilience becoming more mainstream is the lack of measurement capabilities. This new software from INL will allow users to have a better understanding of the resiliency of their systems.

Description: The ReMAIn software is a scalable tool for both operation and planning/design that public utilities can utilize to understand how their system can respond to disturbances in real power and consider the inertia of the system. This metric gives users a better understanding of how their system can maintain frequency stability where there is a disturbance on their system. ReMAIn characterizes resiliency based on a number of asset parameters (operation point in real power, nameplate maximum capacity for real power, latency, ramping rates, and energy constraints) and microgrid inputs (inertia, real-time frequency, and max/min frequency limits). The assets and inertia are then used to calculate the maximum size of disturbance the microgrid could withstand.

Benefits:

• Enables proactive measurement of resiliency


• Allows operators and planners to prepare for disturbance events, which will limit the number and length of outages.

Applications:

• Grid planners and operators.

Development Status: Beta stage, user knowledgeable in field, GUI available for at least one platform.

IP Status: Copyright in software entitled “Resilience of Microgrids with Adaptive Capacity and Inertia (ReMAIn),” BEA Docket No. CW-22-25.

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. Added value is placed on relationships with small businesses, start-up companies, and general entrepreneurship opportunities.

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 Andrew Rankin at td@inl.gov.

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