New research UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering shows how engineers can dramatically speed up simulations used to test high-voltage electricity systems.
As power grids add more renewable energy and large-scale battery storage, utilities face a growing challenge: how to stress-test tomorrow’s electricity systems before investing billions to build them.
Wind, solar and battery-backed grids behave differently from traditional power systems. They are faster, more complex and harder to predict, especially during faults, extreme weather or sudden demand spikes.
But using today’s simulation tools to test those scenarios can take days, which limits how many “what-if” questions engineers can realistically ask.
New research led by UBC Okanagan School of Engineering doctoral students Walid Hatahet and Jared Paull, and associate professor Dr. Liwei Wang, points to a way forward.
The research, published in IEEE Xplore, shows how engineers can dramatically speed up simulations used to test high-voltage electricity systems—the backbone infrastructure that moves power from renewable sources to where it’s needed most.
The work focuses on helping utilities and system designers make better predictions.
“Before utilities invest billions in new infrastructure, they need confidence that systems will behave safely under stress,” says Hatahet, a member of the Flexible Power Transmission Lab. “Our goal was to make those tests faster and more practical, without sacrificing accuracy.
“This work can shorten the path from idea to tested and validated design.”
The challenges come from modern power converters, the digital control systems that regulate electricity flow and are often paired directly with batteries. They are essential for integrating renewables, but they’re also so detailed that conventional simulation tools can struggle to handle them.
The work also reflects close collaboration between academia and industry. Co-author Wei Li is with OPAL-RT Technologies, a Montreal-based firm whose real-time simulation platforms are used by utilities and grid operators worldwide. The research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
For industry partners, the implications are obvious.
“This research directly addresses the computational bottlenecks our users face,” says Jean-Nicolas Paquin, Vice-President of Engineering and Electrical Expertise at OPAL-RT Technologies. “It helps utilities test complex systems more realistically, using the hardware they already have.”
Dr. Wang’s team tackled the problem by rethinking how these systems are modelled and how computing power is used. By separating fast and slow processes and running simulations across CPUs and GPUs in parallel, the researchers achieved speed gains of up to 79 times compared with conventional methods while still matching high-accuracy reference models.
That difference could change how grids are designed.
While the study itself is technical, its impact is simple: better simulations lead to better decisions. As Canada and other countries modernize their power grids, those decisions will influence reliability, resilience and cost for decades to come.
“Faster simulations mean engineers can test more scenarios, explore edge cases and identify risks much earlier,” says Dr. Wang. “That improves reliability and reduces uncertainty as renewables and storage are added to the grid.”
