Top Innovators
Elizabeth Cook, Samuel Levinson, Sabrina Nguyen, Daniel Rodgers, Alex Rosenblatt, Richard Saporito, and Jessica Valentine represent the Advanced Grid Solutions team at Duquesne Light Company.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Talk about the innovations that led to your team winning the John Beggs Top Innovator Award for Energy Transition, how they work, and benefits For Duquesne Light Company.
Elizabeth Cook: We submitted three projects, but the vision behind all of them is to enable situational awareness to the edge of the grid. When we're thinking about how we're setting up and preparing for the new energy economy that's being enabled by distributed energy resources, we need to know the real-time performance of assets we're in charge of, to ensure safe, reliable, affordable power.
The idea behind our innovation is thinking outside the box and looking to the larger industries to unlock new ways of doing things. That is embracing data and data analytics.
One project, Smart Electric Energy Districts (SEEDs), came from a perspective of seeing how our grid became one of the largest machines in the world. However, as innovative technologies start to be incorporated on that machine, we must start enabling the grid to perform in smaller pockets.
Instead of microgrids, how do we look at our system holistically, and start identifying areas of our territory or customers and how we serve them, provide novel solutions, and embrace the edge capability?