Automating Operation of Large Electric Power Systems Over Broad Ranges of Supply/Demand and Equipment Status

From Hierarchical to Open Access Electric Power Systems

“…The limiting challenge in operating today's electric power systems is generally seen when the system enters conditions for which no preventive actions are in place [43]. This occurrence can happen in a variety of scenarios, most of which are a combination of extreme demand variations around the forecast and large equipment failures.…”

Distributed electric power systems of the future: Institutional and technological drivers for near-optimal performance

“…It is possible, however, to develop fundamentally different strategies for surviving stress by implementing technologies which adapt in an automated and distributed way to the changing conditions [5]. These technologies are generally viewed as being disruptive to the current top-down planning and operating practices.…”

“…A closer look into these questions reveals that current design criteria are generally inadequate for selecting technologies whose added-value rests on time-of-use and/or just-in-time decision making [3,5]. Recall that the planning decisions in today's industry are for assumed peak loading conditions; technologies relevant for peak-load shaving do not enter the criteria used.…”

“…Coming up with the benchmark customer performance is much harder, however, unless the customer explicitly provides his demand functions to reflect the willingness to pay for some of these, as described later in this section [19]. 5 The criteria based on which the regulators decided on and approved the subsidies are not well documented; for purposes of identifying fundamental issues, it is important to recognise that subsidies generally were not related to the load profile served nor to the cost of power produced. …”

Adaptive reliability revisited

“…This fundamental observation requires a framework which re-captures the temporal and spatial inter-dependencies in order to manage the complex grid adaptively during abnormal conditions. Modeling, monitoring and decision making framework capable of re-capturing these inter-dependencies while keeping the complexities manageable is introduced as the basis for monitoring and decision making when the system is outside the nominal conditions [2], [3]. Adaptive reliability amounts to: 1) selecting performance subobjectives adaptively depending on the conditions sensed at each level of an otherwise decomposed system; 2) exchanging minimal information for capturing systemwide efficiencies across horizontally separated control areas; and 3) implementing decisions at each level of the decomposed system in coordination with the rest of the system.…”