Fixing a power grid that's in crisis
Josh Wepman likes to say that he and the thousands of engineers he works with are dedicated to maintaining and improving the world's biggest machine. “When it was built 70 years ago it was supposed to last 30 years,” he said. “But it's still going.”
Wepman, who serves as Chief Technology Officer for Energy, Infrastructure, and Automation Solutions at Leidos, is referring to the U.S. electric power grid. He recently discussed the enormous challenges that the power industry is facing in trying to convert an aging system into a more efficient one that can face the stresses of climate change, while increasingly drawing on renewable energy sources. “We're building the tools that can drive more resilience into the system while keeping costs low,” he explained.
Empowering engineers
The demands on the power grid as we head toward the mid-21st century are becoming vastly different than in the past, noted Wepman. That's largely because climate change is bringing on more extreme weather events, and the drive to cut greenhouse gasses is spurring growing reliance on solar and wind power, among other factors.
The problem in trying to face these changes isn't a lack of investment, he insisted, pointing out that the industry is spending more than $80 billion a year on capital projects to improve the grid. But there is one thing that's in critically short supply he noted: Engineers who can maintain and improve the existing components, and design and build the needed new ones. “There simply aren't enough of them to do the job,” he said. “The problems have gotten bigger than the number of people we have to throw at it.”
Amplifying the engineer shortage is the fact that much of what power engineers do requires long hours away from their workstations. “We have to send engineers out into the field just to look at things,” he explained. “They do a lot of driving around in trucks in order to figure out where in the system something is going wrong.”
But if power engineers have been stretched too thin, said Wepman, there's another resource that hasn't yet been fully utilized: data. Thanks to everything from automated sensors to satellites, he explained, information about the power grid has been rolling in at an ever-increasing pace. “Now we have a lot of data, along with the computing horsepower we need to make good use of it,” he said.
To take advantage of that data, Leidos and its partners have been building tools that automate much of what power engineers do. “It's not about replacing engineers, it's about enabling the engineers we have to do more, and to do it easily and quickly enough to handle the challenges we face,” Wepman explained.
Hardening against storms
One of the grid components that's getting special attention from Leidos and its partners is the power distribution network—that is, the equipment that carries electricity from substations to the homes and businesses that consume it. As much of that equipment ages, including poles and wires, engineers must determine what needs replacing or fortifying, and how best to do it to reflect both supply and demand.
“With our new tools, we're streamlining everything involved in that process, from how customers give us new projects, to how we survey existing infrastructure, to how we model the problem, solve it, and implement the solution,” said Wepman. “Projects that used to take a dozen hours now take four or five.” When that time-savings is multiplied by the many thousands of projects that are being tackled, the efficiency gains are enormous, he noted.
One important application of the new tools is “hardening” the grid to protect against ever-more-frequent extreme weather events, by making sure poles and wires stay intact in high winds and flooding. Equally important is responding quickly to grid problems when an event does strike. “When a Category 4 storm comes through an area, the engineers might have to go out and inspect 750,000 poles to figure out which 35,000 are broken, over 21,000 miles worth of electric lines,” he said.
In one effort to speed that process, Leidos partnered with the Intel Corporation and a power company in 2022 to deploy a fleet of drones to do much of the storm-damage surveying in a pilot project. “The drones were able to fly out to find and quickly report the damage,” said Wepman. “That allowed us to immediately figure out everything from how many crews we needed to bring in from other states to how many hotel rooms and sandwiches we needed to get ready.”
Satellite data has also made it far easier to handle the giant task of cutting back trees that are poised to damage power lines in high winds. A Leidos study in East Texas found that there were about one million trees in a two-square-mile area—but only a quarter of a percent of them threatened power wires. “Now we're automating the process of finding dead and dying trees near power lines by using machine learning,” said Wepman.
A new mix
The challenges of making the grid more resilient are becoming more complex as solar and wind power become a bigger and bigger part of the mix. “We need to find ways to continue providing power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing,” he explained. “That means we need more ways to store power and more ability to quickly turn resources on and off as we need them. Then we can automatically balance the mix so that we're always choosing the lowest-cost, most reliable sources of power.” Part of that mix, he adds, will increasingly come from consumers themselves, as they enlist the batteries in their electric vehicles to sell stored energy back to the grid at times of high demand.
Wepman is quick to point out that there isn't going to be one big solution to the challenges that the grid is facing because of climate change. “Instead of a giant leap, it's going to be lots and lots of little things that will add up to decarbonizing electricity production and making the grid fully resilient,” he says. “We're working with our partners to stitch all those little things together, and it's going to have a bigger and bigger impact.”
It's critical to maintain optimism in that battle, Wepman emphasized. “We could just throw our hands up and say, 'These problems are just too big,'” he said. “But every one of us can be empowered to have at least a small impact. When a young person says to me, 'What are you doing to help?', I want to be able to say I was part of the solution. That's what makes me passionate about what we're doing.”
For more details, we invite you to listen to our podcast – The Energy Grid Is In Crisis, But We Can Fix It
