Adam Birchfield

Before the advent of synthetic electric grids, public test cases for electric transmission grids were limited to the IEEE test cases and similar datasets. While these have served the community well, they do not match the size, complexity, or structure of today’s bulk electric grids. Industry grid models, however, are not publicly sharable because of critical energy infrastructure information (CEII) designation and similar restrictions. To address these challenges, over the last few years new methodologies have been developed to create synthetic (fictitious) electric grid models that better match the size, complexity, and structure of actual grids, while being free of CEII. This presentation discusses some of the latest research efforts in building synthetic grids and introduces some of the most recent public datasets available for large-scale electric grid simulation research.

Biography:

Adam B. Birchfield is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to this he was a research engineer at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He received the B.E.E. degree from Auburn University in 2014, M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University in 2018. Dr. Birchfield’s research is in power system modeling, large system transient dynamics, applications of synthetic power grid datasets, and the resilience of power systems to high-impact, low-frequency events. Dr. Birchfield is a recipient of the 2025 NSF CAREER award.