Leveraging Real-World Challenges to Increase Partnership Impact: UVM’s CREATE Center
June 12, 2025—Practical, day-to-day problems that collaborators care about are a natural anchor for strategic university-industry partnerships. Close knowledge of pain points and shared data can bring tight focus to research efforts while increasing the relevance of the research itself. As a previous 3-Minute Read explored through the University of Waterloo and Rogers Communications’ 5G partnership, deep engagement multiplies the benefits: new research capabilities, expanded student experiences, and innovation gains.
An emerging partnership between the University of Vermont (UVM), Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO), and local distribution utilities like Vermont Electric Cooperative (VEC) is shaping the future of grid resilience, flexibility, and reliability across the state. This collaboration is anchored at CREATE, UVM’s new Center for Resilient Energy and Autonomous Technologies in Engineering.
A regional, scalable sandbox
Vermont offers a rare combination of strengths that make it an ideal testing ground for cutting-edge energy solutions. Its relatively small size allows for faster implementation, tighter collaboration, and scalable insights that can inform national strategies. Strong civic infrastructure, an ambitious policy landscape, and tightly interconnected electric utilities create fertile ground for experimentation and progress.
At the core of this innovation ecosystem is data—real, high-resolution utility data that powers better models, which in turn enable better, more informed decisions. CREATE works shoulder-to-shoulder with utilities and stakeholders to address real-world operational challenges, while also preparing the next generation of power and energy engineers to lead this transformation.
This strong research-industry pipeline stems from a Memorandum of Understanding signed between UVM and VELCO in 2021, which has since catalyzed a growing number of collaborative projects. Through this partnership, UVM researchers and utilities have established robust and secure means of sharing data streams that support the development of advanced grid optimization tools and co-simulation platforms spanning transmission and distribution systems.
Data insights: Seeing the forest plus the trees
One example of this collaboration in action is the SOLVER project (System Optimization and LiDAR for Vermont Energy Resilience), funded by the Leahy Center for Rural Partnerships. SOLVER explores how LiDAR sensor data can be used to identify trees and other vegetation that pose a potential threat to electric infrastructure, such as overhead power lines. CREATE researchers integrate these outage risks with real utility data to build integrated transmission and distribution models that co-simulate the system’s behavior under credible contingencies and evaluate their impact on grid reliability. This analysis informs better vegetation management and grid operations, which mitigate the impact of outages given constrained utility resources.
Similarly, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity-funded projects like MAPLE LEAF and MAPLE BRANCH focus on enhancing grid resilience by using sensor data and telemetry to update and calibrate models that then inform optimized settings of substation relays (e.g., under-frequency load shedding or UFLS) and inverter controls (e.g., Volt-VAR control or VVC). These data-driven strategies not only predict where and how the grid is likely to be stressed but also allow for preemptive tuning of protection and control systems.
CREATE also leads the EnergyShed project at UVM, which generates community-level models of electric demand and distributed resources to inform localized planning decisions. These insights are derived from data gathered across Vermont and used to assess the potential for electrification and distributed energy resource adoption, particularly in underserved rural areas. As part of this effort, the EnergyShed team is developing user-friendly dashboard tools, which will help local decision makers evaluate the economic, environmental, social, and grid performance (reliability and resilience) tradeoffs of energy transitions. The outcome is actionable results that help utilities and communities cooperate to make smarter investment and planning decisions.
The value of CREATE’s work lies in its infrastructure, secure data sharing, and people. The Center integrates testbeds, software tools, and real-time analytics to validate new energy science and engineering methods and algorithms that improve grid planning and operations across temporal and spatial scales. Leveraging raw data, this ecosystem produces actionable insights through rigorous modeling and optimization, ultimately empowering utilities to make well-informed, technically grounded decisions.
Stable, responsive structure
A truly collaborative feedback loop increases the value of the CREATE partnership. Utilities bring operational pain points and data to UVM, and CREATE’s students and researchers deliver innovative models, insights, and control strategies that are directly applicable to Vermont’s evolving energy landscape. In under five years, the collaboration has led to deeper student engagement through internships, hands-on research projects, peer-reviewed publications, and post-graduate career opportunities in the power sector. It demonstrates the value of strategic partnerships that creatively tap into capabilities across complex organizations. By collaborating closely, each can surface new ways to increase the benefits.
Why it matters
In Vermont, the partnership is producing innovation that is practical and data-driven. With a collaborative mindset and real-world testbeds, UVM and its partners are turning ambitious grid modernization goals into tangible, replicable solutions – one line of code, one simulation, and one informed decision at a time.
Thank you to Patricia Coates of the University of Vermont for contributing the insights in this week’s 3-Minute Read.
We want to hear from you. How would your organization approach expanding a partnership to enhance its strategic impact? Let us know on LinkedIn.
The 3-Minute Read is a UIDP member information piece and does not represent the opinions of our members or representatives. We welcome your comments on our LinkedIn profile.