Working Toward a Smarter Grid
The Illinois Center for a Smarter Electric Grid (ICSEG) is a 5-year project that is developing and operating a facility at the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide services for the validation of information technology and control aspects of Smart Grid systems, including micro grids and distributed energy resources. The key objective is to test and validate within a laboratory setting how new and more cost-effective Smart Grid technologies, tools, techniques, and system configurations can be used in trustworthy configurations that significantly improve upon the ones that are in common practice today. The laboratory is becoming a resource for Smart Grid equipment suppliers and integrators and electric utilities to allow validation of system designs before deployment.