UT Designated as Engineering Research Center
This summer, we were pleased to announce that UT Knoxville had received a five-year, $18 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy to address the nation’s critical need to develop a smart grid. This will put UT at the forefront of research, education, and technology for sustainable energy systems.
This is the first time UT Knoxville has been chosen to lead an NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) and the first time an ERC will focus on power transmission systems. An NSF ERC is historically the most prestigious award given to a university industry team.
The new center will be called CURENT (Center for Ultra-wide-area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks) and will involve a consortium of academia, industry, and national laboratories. CURENT will be housed in our new Min Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building, which will open in January.
The country’s electrical grid has been chronically overstretched, resulting in costly and inconvenient blackouts. Since 1982, an increase in peak demand for electricity has exceeded transmission growth by almost 25 percent, according to the DOE. As the nation’s population grows, this overload is expected to worsen.
Through CURENT, UT Knoxville will play a central role in President Barack Obama’s goal to take America’s early-twentieth-century power system into the twenty-first century through cutting-edge research, technologies, and methods to operate the power grid efficiently and reliably over long distances.
Kevin Tomsovic, head of UT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will direct CURENT, and Yilu Liu, Governor’s Chair for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will serve as deputy director.
The center’s innovations will enable a global shift away from fossil fuels by facilitating higher levels of renewable energy resources within electric grids. To consumers, it means greener, more sustainable, and more reliable power.
The future workforce is also a focus. CURENT will educate a new generation of energy leaders from diverse backgrounds with a global perspective. The educational mission concentrates on developing a broad interdisciplinary program that benefits graduate, undergraduate, and pre-college students.
CURENT has broad industry support from more than forty companies, including electric power utilities, manufacturers, consulting firms, and national laboratories, such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Partner academic institutions include Northeastern University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tuskegee University, Tsinghua (China) University, the University of Waterloo (Canada), and the National Technical University of Athens (Greece).
CURENT has the potential for continued NSF–DOE funding of four to five million dollars annually over the next decade.
For more information about CURENT, visit CURENT.