High-performance computing for electric grid planning and operations

High-performance computing (HPC) is having a profound impact on scientific discovery and engineering in a variety of areas, and researchers are beginning to demonstrate how HPC can impact problems in energy grid planning and operations. Contemporary supercomputers can perform over 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second and have more than 1.4 petabytes of memory - roughly 5 orders of magnitude greater than a commodity PC workstation. This level of computing power changes the very nature of problems that can be solved. Researchers at LLNL have used HPC systems to accelerate execution of a renewables planning study, by solving a thousand unit commitment and dispatch problems in parallel; this generated new insights and allowed for a more detailed study than would have been otherwise achievable. Ongoing work at LLNL includes the development and testing of new parallel algorithms for unit commitment problems, including multi-scenario stochastic unit commitment. These algorithms will enable greater grid and time resolution and provide more accurate solutions because of the increase in model fidelity.