Project Summary: As renewable and distributed energy generation increases on the nations grids, the integration costs prohibitively increase, and optimization of grid interconnection will become critical. The existing methods used for systems level design and planning of interconnected grids are a labor-heavy, lengthy and highly iterative process. Current methods of evaluating network performance and estimating project costs requires hundreds of hours of a skilled designers time. A demand exists to develop an automated software for interconnection studies; reducing time and cost to get to commissioning and decreasing system level costs for renewable energy generation. An automated planning tool that generates cable routes, specifies substation interconnection requirements, and provides real-time feedback on system costs will not only improve the grid interconnection design process, but allow the United States to deploy greater amounts of renewable power. Makai Ocean Engineering, with Telos Energy and Pivvot, (the Makai team) proposes to develop a software tool to more efficiently generate viable cable routes and specify the physical sub-station upgrades in an interconnection scheme, and subsequently estimate the system costs; specifically for the transmission/distribution lines and sub-station feeders. The proposed software will automate the generation of routes for a networked power cable system, taking into account the various constraints along a route that includes not only cable costs but the terrain, environmental, societal, and regulatory information within the area. Inclusion of sub-station upgrades and costs at the feeders, in addition to cable installation costs, will provide a comprehensive interconnection planning tool. The proposed software, which we are calling MakaiDTG (Makaiplan Digital Twin for Grids), will leverage the Makai teams extensive experience with project cost-estimation and cable route engineering. MakaiPlan is the worlds leading submarine cable planning software, with over 400 licenses sold throughout the world. The MakaiPlan and MakaiLay software suite is used by over 90% of the subsea telecommunications cable installation fleet, and used worldwide for over 20 years to install over 600,000km of cable. The proposed MakaiDTG will expand on the MakaiPlan base, with the additional libraries and functions required to accurately predict the interconnection cost and optimal transmission routing for grid sub-systems in real-time. The software will provide a seamless work flow for client engineers to initialize, plan, predict, and optimize for a wide range of transmission line and grid installations for a particular set of project constraints. User interfaces, built-in analysis tools, and output options will be guided by Makais experienced team of cable route engineers, in close coordination with the government and subject matter experts. While the focus of the effort will be developing the tools to expand MakaiPlan for use on the land-based energy grids, MakaiDTG will continue to leverage the existing MakaiPlan capabilities for offshore systems, providing the DoE and commercial developers, with the capability to model interconnection that includes both offshore wind and onshore PV projects, for example.
