This paper puts forward the vision that a natural future stage of the electricity network could be a grid spanning the whole planet and connecting most of the large power plants in the world: this is the "Global Grid". The main driving force behind the Global Grid will be the harvesting of remote renewable sources, and its key infrastructure element will be the high capacity long transmission lines. Wind farms and solar power plants will supply load centers with green power over long distances.This paper focuses on the introduction of the concept, showing that a globally interconnected network can be technologically feasible and economically competitive. We further highlight the multiple opportunities emerging from a global electricity network such as smoothing the renewable energy supply and electricity demand, reducing the need for bulk storage, and reducing the volatility of the energy prices. We also discuss possible investment mechanisms and operating schemes. Among others, we envision in such a system a global power market and the establishment of two new coordinating bodies, the "Global Regulator" and the "Global System Operator".

This paper introduces for the first time, to our knowledge, a framework for physics-informed neural networks in power system applications. Exploiting the underlying physical laws governing power systems, and inspired by recent developments in the field of machine learning, this paper proposes a neural network training procedure that can make use of the wide range of mathematical models describing power system behavior, both in steady-state and in dynamics. Physics-informed neural networks require substantially less training data and can result in simpler neural network structures, while achieving high accuracy. This work unlocks a range of opportunities in power systems, being able to determine dynamic states, such as rotor angles and frequency, and uncertain parameters such as inertia and damping at a fraction of the computational time required by conventional methods. This paper focuses on introducing the framework and showcases its potential using a single-machine infinite bus system as a guiding example. Physics-informed neural networks are shown to accurately determine rotor angle and frequency up to 87 times faster than conventional methods.

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Power system security assessment methods require large datasets of operating points to train or test their performance. As historical data often contain limited number of abnormal situations, simulation data are necessary to accurately determine the security boundary. Generating such a database is an extremely demanding task, which becomes intractable even for small system sizes. This paper proposes a modular and highly scalable algorithm for computationally efficient database generation. Using convex relaxation techniques and complex network theory, we discard large infeasible regions and drastically reduce the search space. We explore the remaining space by a highly parallelizable algorithm and substantially decrease computation time. Our method accommodates numerous definitions of power system security. Here we focus on the combination of N-k security and small-signal stability. Demonstrating our algorithm on IEEE 14-bus and NESTA 162-bus systems, we show how it outperforms existing approaches requiring less than 10% of the time other methods require.

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This paper introduces for the first time a framework to obtain provable worst-case guarantees for neural network performance, using learning for optimal power flow (OPF) problems as a guiding example. Neural networks have the potential to substantially reduce the computing time of OPF solutions. However, the lack of guarantees for their worst-case performance remains a major barrier for their adoption in practice. This work aims to remove this barrier. We formulate mixed-integer linear programs to obtain worst-case guarantees for neural network predictions related to (i) maximum constraint violations, (ii) maximum distances between predicted and optimal decision variables, and (iii) maximum sub-optimality. We demonstrate our methods on a range of PGLib-OPF networks up to 300 buses. We show that the worst-case guarantees can be up to one order of magnitude larger than the empirical lower bounds calculated with conventional methods. More importantly, we show that the worst-case predictions appear at the boundaries of the training input domain, and we demonstrate how we can systematically reduce the worst-case guarantees by training on a larger input domain than the domain they are evaluated on.Index Terms-Neural networks, mixed-integer linear programming, optimal power flow.

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