USF Awarded $50,000 For Clean Energy Project By Department Of Energy

TAMPA, FL — On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity announced that the University of South Florida is among the four winners of the American-Made High-Voltage Direct Current Prize.

This $200,000 prize — $50,000 to each winning team — incentivized competitors to share new technology solutions that improve the performance and resilience of the U.S. energy grid. The knowledge gained from these prizes will help reduce technology gaps that hinder HVDC deployment in the nation and enable new innovative solutions to technical challenges through the development of new hardware, controls, and advanced concepts.

“Ensuring that low-cost, clean energy is available to support and improve the lives of all Americans is a priority for the Office of Electricity,” said Gene Rodrigues, assistant secretary for electricity. “The ideas presented through the HVDC Prize will continue to strengthen the nation’s grid and pave the way for new, cutting-edge solutions within the renewables industry.”

HVDC Prize competitors were required to submit technical narratives proposing their solutions and actionable steps toward advancing their ideas for the HVDC industry.

The University of South Florida won for its generalized dynamic circuit model design for HVDC. This submission provided a unified modeling framework for HVDCs that enables three types of analysis simultaneously: stability, harmonics and ferroresonance. To meet this goal, this team developed dynamic circuit representations for HVDC converters with both DC and AC ports, accelerating HVDC system studies in the planning and design stages.

The prize is part of the American-Made Challenges program, which incentivizes innovation through prizes, training, teaming and mentoring by connecting the nation’s entrepreneurs
and innovators to America’s National Labs and the private sector. Since the American-Made Challenges prize program launched in 2018 to support U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation in clean energy, DOE has awarded over $150 million in cash prizes and incentives
to competitors.