UW-Madison hosts UNIFI Consortium annual meeting, which is preparing the grid for more renewable energy

The Universal Interoperability for Grid-Forming Inverters (UNIFI) Consortium is holding its annual meeting on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison July 22-24, 2025. Researchers from universities, national laboratories, and grid operators from across the United States are scheduled to attend and present at the event. Dominic Gross, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison and a consortium member is serving as local host for the event.

The UNIFI consortium is an effort to develop the technology, standards, and guidelines for implementing “grid forming” inverters in the power grid, to ensure reliability, security, and affordability.

Adding renewable energy resources to a power grid is not as simple as plugging them into the system. Legacy energy sources, like coal-powered plants and gas turbines, naturally produce alternating current, or AC, electricity, which is ideal for sending power long distances along the grid. Many types of renewable energy, like wind, solar and battery arrays, produce direct current, or DC energy. Before that electricity can enter the grid, it must be converted into AC.

In grids where massive rotating fossil-fuel powered turbines produce electricity at a stable frequency, it’s possible to use grid following inverters that lock on to the grid frequency and synchronize with it. But as more and more renewable energy comes online and the number of legacy rotating energy sources decreases, there is no strong AC “heartbeat” for grid-following inverters to lock onto. This can destabilize the frequency of the grid or make it difficult to bring the power back online if it goes down.

That’s why the UNIFI consortium is developing the technology and guidelines for grid forming inverters that form a stable frequency. Renewable energy outfitted with these inverters can maintain a stable grid voltage and frequency that are critical to the reliability and resilience of grid operation. And if the grid does go down, they are able to work together to restart the system without relying on large legacy rotating power sources.

The UNIFI Consortium focuses on standardization of grid-forming technologies and integration into electric grids at any scale to accelerate solar and wind deployment. Along with its industry partners, the consortium plans to ultimately develop standards and a universal set of guidelines that enable seamless integration of inverter-based resources.

At the three-day Madison meeting, consortium members will meet in person for presentations and discussion sessions to learn about the latest in grid-forming technology innovation and network with others in the space.

Gross, who is leading UNIFI’s control research area, says that currently, grid-forming inverters have only been deployed in limited numbers along with battery storage systems. At the Madison meeting, the group will discuss ways to implement the technology with other resources, like wind and solar. Another major topic will be fault ride through, or the ability for the inverters to keep operating through disruptions like short circuits and how they handle power system fault protection systems.

UW-Madison has a long history with grid forming inverters; in the early 1990s then PhD student Mukul Chandorkar, now a professor at IIT Bombay, and former Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC) faculty member Deepak Divan, both part of the UNIFI effort, developed the basis for the most common form of grid-forming control. ECE and WEMPEC Professor Emeritus Bob Lasseter also made significant contributions to the technology.

But that’s not why UNIFI chose Madison this year. “We’re not holding the meeting here because of that, though that is some nice background,” says Gross, who is happy to show his colleagues the university’s labs and campus. “We’re holding it in Madison because it is nice here in the summer.”

Featured image caption: Members of the UNIFI annual meeting on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Photo credit: Todd Brown, School of Medicine and Public Health