NC State- FREEDM center

Modernizing the Electric Grid
The modern human depends on an ever-updating array of electronic devices: smartphones, smart televisions, smart thermostats, computers, even electric cars.
Yet the American electric grid that powers those devices has gone largely unchanged for decades. It still runs largely on sources that harm the environment and compromise national security. It still exposes consumers everywhere to outages anywhere and still has little capacity for tapping renewable energy sources.

In 2008, the National Science Foundation chose NC State to lead an effort to create a modern power grid. At the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems Engineering Research Center, universities from the United States have joined forces with industry partners to develop a more secure, sustainable environmentally friendly electric grid.

At the FREEDM Center, we’re building the internet of energy: a network of distributed energy resources that intelligently manages power using secure communications and advanced power electronics. Our research priorities include power electronics packaging, controls theory, solid state transformers, fault isolation devices, and power systems simulation and demonstration.