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The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Smart Grid Center will use a $7.5 million Department of Energy (DOE) grant to help advance India’s power grid. | Image: Getty Images

The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Smart Grid Center is part of a United States team that will use a $7.5 million Department of Energy (DOE) grant to help advance India’s power grid to ensure access to affordable and reliable energy.

India’s Ministry of Science and Technology will match the commitment of the DOE, along with other Indian partners, bringing the total project commitment to $30 million.

“This highly collaborative international project will give TEES researchers a chance to use their expertise to solve the grid problems in one of the largest power systems in the world,” said Dr. Mladen Kezunovic, director of the Smart Grid Center. “TEES has unique strengths and capabilities in designing the grids of the future and this is an opportunity to show that.”

This initiative, supported by DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, builds on the department’s commitment to fostering the reliable, resilient and secure delivery of electricity needed for strong U.S. national security, economic growth and global leadership. It also furthers the DOE’s collaboration with India under the U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy.

“This new consortium demonstrates the U.S. and Indian commitments to ensuring access to affordable and reliable energy in both countries,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said. “We know that continued grid innovation will promote economic growth and energy security in the United States and India.”

To help pave the way to a more advanced distribution grid that will allow greater use of distributed energy resources, such as microgrids and energy storage, the new consortia will bring together experts from academia, DOE’s national laboratories and industry. Together with their counterparts in India, the center will conduct research and deploy new smart grid and energy storage technologies that will modernize the grids of both nations to make them “smarter,” while increasing resilience and reliability, DOE officials said.

The U.S. consortium is led by Washington State University, along with TEES, MIT, the University of Hawaii, Idaho National Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Snohomish County (WA) Public Utility District, Avista, Burns and McDonnell, ETAP Operation Technology, ALSTOM Grid/GE Grid Solutions, Clean Energy Storage, ABB, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

The Indian team, led by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, includes partners from IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, IIT Roorkee, IIT Bhubaneshwar and The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.