GridForm’s Approach to Self-funding Resilient Local Energy Resources

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The Department of Energy (DOE) provided a society-preserving grand challenge of “grid forming” when they hired the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Washington to address the problem of the interface between the traditional commercial electric power grids and renewable energy and distributed energy resources (DERs). This work resulted in DOE creating the subsequent funding opportunity announcement (FOA). This FOA, DE-FOA-0002437 of 2020/2021, which explains how we face growing power failures, not due to weather but electromagnetic accidents arising from the incompatibility of the traditional electric power systems and these new intermittent resources. The conclusion of the study is that far more frequent power outages are inevitable making it urgent to come up with ways to recover the grid as soon as possible from local areas up.  This is why DOE called this a “grid forming” problem and offered funding of $5M per year for a consortium to solve it.  The requirements for such a consortium were laid out in both the FOA document and the “Research Roadmap for Grid-Forming Inverters” and are recommended reading.

 

The GridForm consortium was formed to address that need and similar ones such as how might microgrids and other DERs be funded in the shortest possible time to meet these needs. GridForm believes that it is possible for users to fund their own solutions from savings and earnings through the solutions themselves.  This website provides the resources and contacts to start that journey of self-funding resilient local energy resources.