Carnegie Mellon University

CMU Team to Modernize Portugal's Electric Infrastructure

May 13, 2020

CMU Team Working to Modernize Portugal's Electric Infrastructure

Amanda King

The Scott Institute's Energy Fellow Soummya Kar (ECE), Systems Scientist Panayiotis Moutis, and Faculty Affiliate Javad Mohammadi (ECE) are partnering with REN, operator of the national electricity transmission grid and the national natural gas transportation grid in Portugal, to architect the Portuguese future grid. Portugal's renewable energy portfolio is expected to significantly grow over the coming years and the future grid should be able to accommodate high-level penetration of intermittent energy resources.

This multi-year partnership is focused on developing long-term operational plans to expand and operate the grid as economically as possible according to reliability criteria. Expanding the current transfer capacity of the electric network is a challenging problem to solve given the many renewable generation scenarios and infrastructure expansion options that need to be taken into consideration.

"Expansion of transmission networks has, traditionally, been a very challenging task for the electricity sector," said Moutis. "Add to that the effects and requirements from big renewables projects. We are beyond excited to partner with REN to develop planning tools for the Portuguese electric grid of the future."

The recent success of Javad Mohammadi and Soummya Kar (in collaboration with Kyri Baker from CU Boulder) in ARPAE's Grid Optimization Challenge had led to the inception of GRID ARMOR framework. The GRID ARMOR (which stands for Grid Analytics, Rapid Modeling and Optimization Routines) platform enables solving national scale power system security and optimization problems and the CMU team intends to extend the capabilities of this platform to solve grid expansion planning for REN.

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