Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and its power industry and software vendor partners are developing an innovative sustainable data evolution technology (SDET) to create open-access power grid datasets and facilitate updates to these datasets by the power grid community. The objective is to make this a sustained effort within and beyond the ARPA-E GRID DATA program so that the datasets can evolve over time and meet the current and future needs for power grid optimization and potentially other applications in power grid operation and planning.

The SDET approach will uniquely 1) derive features and metrics for both transmission and distribution (T&D) systems by analyzing many public and private datasets provided by our industry partners National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), PJM Interconnection (PJM), California Independent System Operator (CAISO), and Avista Utilities (Avista); 2) develop data-creation tools and use these tools to generate large-scale open-access realistic datasets that comply with the metrics for both T&D systems, and 3) validate the created datasets using industry tools provided by our vendor partner General Electric (GE).