Stony Brook Leads Two DOE Projects to Build the Ocean’s Power Grid

Researchers at Stony Brook University will lead two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects, totaling $1 million, to develop the power electronics and control systems that will turn wave and tidal energy into a dependable source of electricity for coastal communities. They will work with Sandia National Laboratories on the first project, and CUNY College of Staten Island on the second.

Funded by the DOE's Marine Energy Foundational Research and Development program, the three-year projects began in March 2026.

Fang Luo, SUNY Empire Innovation Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Spellman High Voltage Electronics Laboratory will lead the project along with co-principal investigator Andrew Singer, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Singer is an expert in underwater acoustic signal processing and subsea communication systems and is also the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Stony Brook was one of only a few universities nationwide to receive two awards in the program's competitive Open topic area.

"Marine energy has long been treated as a device problem: build a better buoy or turbine, while the electrical grid connections are assumed to be well attached to the devices," Luo said. "We see it as a system problem. The winning technology will be an ocean power grid that is modular, self-aware and self-coordinating. That is what we are building at Stony Brook."

The first project is called MREvolution. The researchers will partner with Sandia National Laboratories to create a modular power converter that can draw on waves, tides and energy storage at once and coordinate itself autonomously. The converter uses silicon carbide and gallium nitride semiconductors built to withstand deep-ocean conditions, with digital-twin monitoring that lets operators track equipment health from shore. Sandia researchers Jorge Leon-Quiroga and Rachid Darbali-Zamora will test prototypes at the lab's Distributed Energy Technologies Laboratory in Albuquerque, one of the nation's leading testbeds for wave energy converters.

For the second project, with CUNY College of Staten Island, the researchers will build a real-time simulation and control framework for networks of marine-powered microgrids, capturing everything from millisecond electrical transients to long-term operating costs. The two institutions will demonstrate it on a linked two-microgrid testbed spanning their campuses.

"On land, a power grid can assume its components are able to talk to one another. Underwater, that assumption fails. There is no GPS and no radio, and acoustic signals arrive late and distorted. These systems have to coordinate themselves on sparse and imperfect information, which makes this as much a communications problem as a power electronics one," Singer said.

The Spellman High Voltage Power Electronics Lab is a core facility of the DOE-funded Atlantic Marine Energy Center, where Luo serves as associate director.

"Long Island is surrounded precisely by the resource these technologies are designed for," he said. "Our goal is that when the first commercial ocean-powered microgrids come online, they are run on systems that were born here."

- Debra Scala Giokas