Inside S&C Electric’s and Argonne National Lab’s CRADA partnership

The U.S. power grid is at an inflection point, with factors ranging from blistering summer heat to data center power demand that is potentially set to double from 2025 to 2027, an uptick in wildfires and aging transmission infrastructure. But a significant effort to reshape the grid is also underway. “In this era we’re in now, we’re seeing more investment in the grid than ever,” said Richard Gray, innovation director of S&C Electric Company, which was founded in 1911 in Chicago. “Not only the capital flowing in, and not just for data centers, but also the reliability and resilience plays that a lot of utilities and their regulators are emphasizing now.”

Against that backdrop, S&C Electric has announced an expanded alliance with Argonne National Laboratory. “We have done projects with Argonne in the past,” Gray said. The recent Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between the two organizations will have the broad mission of modernizing the electric grid and making it more resilient. “And Argonne is in the western suburbs of Chicago, so right in our backyard,” Gray added.

A partnership with a national lab like Argonne is a hand-in-glove fit with the announcement noting a joint focus on “grid modernization, grid resilience, power reliability, electrification, and emerging grid technologies.”

“The labs love working with industry, so they were very receptive to the idea of strengthening this a little more with a formal agreement,” Gray said. The CRADA is something like a master services agreement. “It irons out all the legalese ahead of time and allows you to engage with each other on project work much more quickly and much more efficiently, without having to go through different layers of approvals within each organization and then also at the DOE level.” Gray said S&C itself has an R&D organization of roughly 400 people, but its internal work generally starts closer to application than the foundational science Argonne conducts. S&C, for example, is not inherently a materials science company, even though advances in materials can determine whether its grid products become smaller, lighter, stronger or cheaper.

In addition, Argonne operates specialized research infrastructure that S&C would have little reason to replicate in-house, including the Aurora exascale supercomputer. Gray said access to high-performance computing could help S&C determine which experiments might be eliminated or accelerated. “There are things [Argonne] can do with that that we could maybe do ourselves through experimentation,” he said. “The question we’re asking ourselves is what kind of experimentation we could maybe cut out or accelerate through the use of computing.”

One project already underway involves jointly developing ceramic-polymer insulation materials for medium- and high-voltage grid equipment. DOE describes the research more specifically as “High Dielectric Breakdown Strength Ceramic-Polymer Composites,” with Argonne researcher Beihai Ma scheduled to present the work at DOE’s TRAC Peer Review in September.

“That was a case where Argonne has this background IP,” Gray said. Argonne supplied an existing formulation for the composite, and the project is testing its “fitness for purpose for S&C applications or for utility applications.” Gray said the goal is to move the material from low-to-mid technology readiness levels, where it has been demonstrated at lab scale, toward application-relevant validation and commercialization.

S&C is also evaluating whether technologies can clear barriers beyond technical performance. Gray said the company has begun using DOE’s Adoption Readiness Level framework alongside TRL. ARL considers factors such as customer need, supply chain, cost and manufacturability. “TRL is good, but ARL really helps you take a look at what the blockers are,” Gray said.

The attrition between invention and commercialization can be substantial. For instance, a Nature analysis of 12,516 inventions disclosed by University of California campuses from 1990 to 2005 and three associated national labs found that only 20% were ultimately linked to a license.

Those obstacles can emerge well after a technology has proven itself in the lab. An invention can “just sit there in stasis if no supplier can make it on a reasonable scale,” Gray said, while high manufacturing costs can create another barrier. For S&C, the commercialization work therefore includes identifying those constraints early and determining what it would take to produce a technology economically at scale and make it useful in the field. “That’s an important part of the commercialization question,” Gray said.

Gray said S&C and Argonne are working to build direct relationships between their researchers, with S&C’s roughly 400-person R&D organization on one side and Argonne’s scientists and engineers on the other. The two meet virtually on a regular basis, in person several times a year, and run into each other at conferences. “Getting researcher-to-researcher relationships established, that’s the fastest way to collaborate, in my opinion,” he said.

The CRADA then provides a framework for moving those ideas into formal projects with less administrative friction. “Once the researchers say, okay, here’s an opportunity, then we can very quickly establish the nature of any given project, and then just start working and moving forward,” Gray said. Gray said other projects are already in the pipeline, although S&C is not ready to discuss them publicly.

The arrangement also reflects the different roles research institutions and manufacturers can play in moving technology toward market. Argonne itself describes commercialization as requiring collaboration between government and the private sector to help “transition new technologies from the lab to the marketplace.” Gray put the issue more simply: “They need a commercialization path.”

The goal extends beyond any single project. “Really, what we want to do is increase the innovation surface area between the two organizations,” Gray said.