UConn and Eversource collaborate on research
New investment comes as utility plans upgrade for distribution network
Eversource Energy is leveraging its research relationship with the University of Connecticut as the utility prepares to pitch a significant upgrade of its electric distribution network to state regulators.
The utility, which has headquarters in Hartford and Boston, is preparing to present its plans to the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory in March. And research developed at the school’s Eversource Energy Center will be used to justify the system upgrade.
Eversource officials declined to release any details about its presentation to PURA. But Digaunto Chatterjee, Eversource’s vice president of system planning, said the company’s presentation will involve historical power outage data and use computer models to show how the length of those outages would have been reduced if the improvements were already in place.
Chatterjee said the average length of a power outage for Eversource customers in Connecticut is 68 minutes.
“People’s tolerance for losing power is rapidly diminishing and we have to meet those expectations,” he said.
Since the Eversource Energy Center opened in 2015, the utility has invested $16 million in the research center’s work.
That investment will nearly double over the next six years. Eversource officials recently announced they were committing another $14 million to the center’s work through 2028.
Emmanouil Anagnostou, director of the energy center, said the work his team of researchers are doing for the utility “is something pretty unique.” Anagnostou said he believes Eversource is the only electric utility in the United States to have an ongoing research relationship with a college or university.
Much of the center’s research involves computer modeling.
A bank of computers located on the second floor of the Innovation Partnership Building on the school’s Storrs campus, where the center is headquartered, is used to model Eversource’s distribution network and how it reacts to different weather conditions. Another set of computer servers is used by researchers to test cyber-security models, which will become more important as Connecticut moves more broadly to distributive generation like solar panels or microgrids.
The models for predicting how weather will impact the utility’s distribution network do not just focus on town-bytown outages or even neighborhood by neighborhood, Chatterjee said. The outage estimates drill down to how a storm will affect individual circuits within a
substation, he said.
State Sen. Norman Needleman, D-Essex, chairman of the Connecticut legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee, said UConn’s relationship with Eversource “is a good idea.”
“As an academic thing, it’s more objective,” Needleman said.
Joel Gordes, a West Hartford energy consultant, said the partnership between the school and the utility is mutually beneficial.
“It’s a perception type of thing,” Gordes said. “There’s a level of expertise that the university has, which lends credence to things that the utility might want to do.”
But Anagnostou said the operation of the energy center is structured in such a way as to protect the academic independence of the university’s research and avoid the appearance of the work serving as a rubber stamp for what Eversource wants to do.
“We have an advisory board that oversees our research agenda, which is developed by our core faculty,” he said. “Members of the advisory board can approve the agenda, or they can add to it.”
The advisory board for the center includes Marissa Gillett, chairwoman of PURA, as well as other state officials and business
leaders from beyond the electric industry, according to Anagnostou.
The final determination of which research projects move forward is made by a pair of UConn officials and two from Eversource. Anagnostou said in the event of a deadlock, he has the tiebreaking vote.
“One of the factors I considered is which one of
the research projects has the most potential to bring in more external funding,” he said.
The energy center has 30 faculty and senior researchers as well as 36 graduate students and seven undergraduates participating.