Past Advisory Board Member
Grid Engineering For Accelerated Renewable Energy Deployment
Through the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative, the Grid Engineering for Accelerated Renewable Energy Deployment (GEARED), program was created to build a training and education framework that grows the expertise and preparedness of current and future electric utility sector professionals – specifically to accommodate high penetrations of solar electricity and other distributed technologies.IREC, in collaboration with DOE, serves as national administrator of GEARED.The impetus for the GEARED project comes form several challenges: an aging utility workforce, the large number of imminent retirements in U.S. universities, and the need to significantly upgrade the curriculum of power systems engineering programs to address projected needs.Equally important, the GEARED program fills an urgent need for increased power system research, development and analytical capacity, and for integrating these findings into education and training.The goal is to create a national network of centers that support power systems training and curriculum development based on research, development, data generation, collection, analysis and simulation.Central to the five-year GEARED project is the new Distributed Technology Training Consortia (DTTC). Composed of three regional consortiums, each with multiple university, utility and industry partners, the collaborators are working toward the infusion of power systems analysis and R&D into training activities such as curriculum and short course development, internships and co-ops, and continuing education.GEARED creates a network of professionals who come together to develop and widely disseminate content and curriculum for training and education programs that focus on system implications that distributed power technologies present. Via this new network, the DTTC will identify and share training and education best practices and programs, as well as power system research and development.