2026 Event Schedule

Electric industry stakeholders are invited to help define the “Control Room of the Future” and identify gaps for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE). In this workshop, researchers and elicitation experts from DOE national laboratories will facilitate discussions to understand the emerging needs of electric utilities and the offerings of vendors and how DOE can aid the industry in safely and efficiently introducing new technology into operations.

New technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities must be rigorously tested for performance and security, which DOE laboratories are uniquely able to support. Given the convergence of increasing power demand, inverter-based resources, and rapid evolution of AI technologies, DOE is assessing existing capabilities and gaps for test beds to accelerate secure, reliable AI adoption across the power sector.

We invite representatives from sectors within the power industry to join this workshop: Utilities to describe integration challenges, operator workflows, and planning approaches and phases needed to reach the “Control Room of the Future”; Vendors (both traditional power industry vendors—such as those offering Energy Management Systems (EMS), Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS), and Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS)—and new entrants aiming to apply AI and machine learning technologies to grid operations) to describe emerging capabilities and existing internal validation test practices, including the capabilities, availability and effectiveness of existing testbeds; and other operational Stakeholders (e.g., emergency management) to understand the information they require from the control room as well as the information they are sharing with utilities.  

By mapping out existing activities, capabilities, and gaps, this workshop aims to lay the foundation for an envisioned collaborative public-private, multi-laboratory, federated control room test bed. A “Control Room of the Future” test bed can help industry address its operational and control room challenges to strengthen and modernize our nation’s power grid, and to serve as a secure, operator-centric evaluation environment supporting the reliable, safe, and scalable integration of emerging technologies into utility operations.

Workshop Sponsored by National Laboratory of the Rockies