Article re-posted from WSU News
By Siddharth Vodna
Washington State University recently took part in a live demonstration that connected eight laboratories across two continents to simulate the global electric power grid.
Anurag Srivastava, associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was part of a team of researchers in the United States and Europe exploring how to share a diverse set of computing and laboratory resources in a large-scale simulation.
The researchers used the eight connected laboratories to study how to prevent power outages and other disruptions by moving electricity across continents. This parallels a process that utilities currently use on a regional basis.
Grid stability, infrastructure savings
The simulation, called the Real Time (RT) Super Lab, aims to boost future electric grid stability. If electricity can be moved across the globe rather than within only isolated networks, the researchers hope that the work will someday lead to savings on infrastructure and energy use.
Funded and led by the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, the simulation can be used for many applications which require large-scale, real-time simulation, such as studying how electricity can be routed across a vast global network similar to the Internet. While electricity cannot be moved across continents currently, electric grids in different continents could be connected in the near future to make that happen, said Srivastava.