Current initiatives
Enhancing grid resilience—the grid's capacity to withstand disturbances to energy supply, infrastructure threats, and dramatic fluctuations in demand, and the ability to recover quickly when these disturbances occur—is crucial as we face climate change, rapidly growing electricity demand, and shifts to cleaner energy sources.
Electric grids must deliver consistent power around the clock, respond instantly to surges or drops in supply and demand, and have redundant systems to protect against failure. Many factors threaten the stability and resilience of electric grids, including aging infrastructure, extreme weather events, and rapidly increasing demand from data centers and newly electrified systems. Renewables such as wind and solar can provide low-carbon energy for generating electricity, but also introduce intermittency, which increases the need for long-duration energy storage and for control systems and ancillary services to automatically maintain required voltages and frequencies.
Key approaches to building grid resilience are hardening infrastructure through physical and cybersecurity measures; combining intermittent energy sources with storage and firm power supply; deploying advanced planning and optimization techniques to bolster grid and demand flexibility; and increasing reliance on distributed energy resources to reduce the risk of a single point of failure.
The MIT Energy Initiative manages research on a broad range of technical and policy topics related to grid resilience. Some key themes include:
Grid resilience evaluation: We sponsor research that directly evaluates or enhances grid resilience. For example, agent-based models examine how capacity expansion increases grid resilience and optimization methods are used to jointly enhance the resilience of the grid and electrified transportation charging networks.
Energy storage: Building on MIT’s strengths in battery technologies, electrochemistry, and other forms of storage, we have a special focus on long-duration energy storage within the Future Energy Systems Center consortium. We fund technical innovation, techno-economic analysis, and market design and cost optimization related to energy storage.
Renewable energy integration: Our projects focus on siting of renewable energy facilities, optimal renewable energy mixes for different climates and demand scenarios, maintaining grid reliability with high deployment of renewable sources, and inverter control for renewable supply.
Demand flexibility: We support projects on increasing demand flexibility, which is a proven approach for enhancing grid resilience. Projects have studied virtual power plants, management of distributed energy resources at the grid edge, integration of buildings with the grid, and flexible computing loads for data centers.
Mitigating threats: The research we support explores ways to protect grids against the threats posed by climate change, extreme events, and cybersecurity breaches. Projects focus on designing grids and siting renewables to ensure delivery of affordable, reliable power—even as weather events grow more severe—and maximizing resilience to cyberattacks.
Our research staff have also contributed to technical analyses of major multi-factor grid failures, which provide critical lessons for increasing the resilience of electric grids.
Something we don't often realize until a resilience event builds up is how carefully planned and orchestrated the electric grid has to be to run smoothly. And, when multiple things go wrong at the same time you get a catastrophic event. One way we’re addressing this challenge is with a capacity expansion modeling tool we created to evaluate how technologies and policies can support resiliency as the grid decarbonizes.
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