Salt River Project’s state-of-the-art Technology Innovation Lab in Arizona offers the public power utility’s employees a wide variety of hands on training opportunities.
The Technology Innovation Lab is located in Scottsdale, Arizona, “and it's really a hub for hands on training device configuration testing,” said Brant Heap, Director of Protection, Automation and Control at SRP. The lab was completed in 2020 and it became fully operational about April of 2021.
“It spans about 5,400 square feet and it's really modeled off of one of our 23-kV substations but about twice the size...the intent of it is to enhance our power system reliability by supporting our workforce. It does that through training our workforce and then allowing them a space that where they can troubleshoot our existing technologies as well as research a lot of the future technologies in the space where we feel like we need to go and take the power system,” he said in a recent interview with APPA.
He was a guest on APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“Training is indeed a major focus of the lab and something that we do in there a lot. The lab really provides a central place for our employees to kind of learn our maintenance and commissioning practices of a lot of our existing environment in a safe environment.”
It is isolated from the grid “and so it's a safe place that they can go in there and learn and develop. We conduct over 100 training sessions annually, covering areas such as performance testing, troubleshooting, cybersecurity compliance, you name it, there's a variety of trainings that we do here,” Heap said.
“The trainings also span multiple disciplines across our engineering and field crews, so it's also a place where we'll do our apprenticeship training, training for our field crews and so really it is anything that supports operational technology. We centralized that in the lab here so that we can improve our workforce and train them appropriately.”
Additionally, over the last several years, “it really serves as an education place for a wide variety of both internal and external stakeholders and in various partners across the industry is what I would say. So really that will demonstrate how our protection automation control systems, coupled with our telecom, really support SRP in the overall reliability of our power system.”
Heap also addressed the key considerations that a utility would need to take into account prior to proceeding with steps to create a technology innovation lab similar to SRP’s.
“We've had a lot of interest in the lab since it's been commissioned from external parties, and one of the key considerations that I would say there is the lab is really focused on our workforce and so the intent is to get your upper leadership and your company aligned and understanding that the lab is there that will support our workforce today and as well as our workforce of the future,” he said.
“So that really is aligning that vision -- I think that's one of the first steps that you have to do. It's often a struggle to get funds to support things such as a lab. But if you can really align that with your corporate vision, goals and objectives, that is key, in my opinion.”
That now “allows us to foster collaboration among a variety of groups, which is one of the key components of actually designing the lab. So once you start in the design phase you have to involve multiple groups -- even more groups than you think will be -- on a on a traditional basis -- working and operating within the lab because you gain a lot of additional insight. And so I would strongly encourage that collaboration across multiple departments to make sure that you're building a lab that not only supports your needs of today, but supports the needs of the future. You need some space that you can grow into.”
Heap also noted that the lab’s R&D work includes virtualized protection automation control.
“Virtualized protection automation control -- when you break it down, you're separating hardware and software of the traditional protection and control systems, and you're standardizing the hardware within your substations,” he noted.
“Then you're building that flexibility in the software. If you picture a typical substation where you have a large number of protective relays, RTUs, you can now consolidate those into a server and then through software still do everything that you do historically, but also have the flexibility to meet the grid’s need of the future.”
