Electric Energy Systems Electric Energy Systems seeks to explore methods at the frontier of understanding of the future electric power and energy systems worldwide. The track will focus on the electric energy systems in four areas: Minitracks: Integrating Distributed and Renewable Resources Markets, Policy, and Computation Monitoring, Control, and Protection Resilient Networks Track Chairs: Robert J. Thomas School of Electrical Engineering Cornell University 428 Phillips HallIthaca NY 14853 Tel: (607) 255-5083 Fax: (607) 255-8871 Email: rjt1@cornell.edu Thomas J. Overbye Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign 1406 W. Green St.Urbana IL 61801 Tel: (217) 333-4463 Fax: (217) 333-1162 Email: overbye@illinois.edu
Integrating Distributed and Renewable Resources The capabilities and characteristics of innovative supply- side and demand- side technologies in the electric power industry are advancing rapidly, while enabling innovations to power system operations, planning and markets have moved more slowly and have been geographically uneven. Efficient integration of distributed, variable and uncertain system resources with portfolios of existing resources requires evolution in planning, operational and control strategies. Policies and market structures must also continue to evolve. This mini- track invites papers that address modeling, simulation or hardware developments relating to planning, operations and control; as well as economic issues (such as market or rate design), system analyses and case studies. Session 1: Renewables and Distributed Energy Resources Session Organizer and Chair Charlie Smith, Charlie@variablegen.org Electricity market restructuring, advances in energy generation technology and agreements on the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions have paved the way for a large increase in the use of renewable generation connected at both the transmission and distribution level. With wind generation currently having the largest share of the new capacity, and solar generation having the highest rate of growth, this trend is expected to continue to produce an increasing amount of variability and uncertainty in system generation portfolios. A broad array of issues associated with the incorporation of large shares of variable generation (VG) into power system planning, design, and operation, including market operation, needs to be considered. This session invites technical papers addressing new approaches, models and methods for the planning, design and operation of power systems with large or increasing shares of VG. A focus on the key issues of managing increased levels of variability and uncertainty on both the transmission and distribution system with new approaches to increasing system flexibility and incorporating VG plant output forecasting on all time scales, is encouraged. Integration of renewable resources will also require continuing innovation in technology capability to enable the participation of variable generation in AGC systems, ancillary service markets and distribution system management. New approaches to the evolution of the wind and photovoltaic plant design to enable this participation are necessary. This session will address some of the challenges and approaches to achieve these goals. (Expect 3 to 4 papers in this session) Session 2: Demand Response, Microgrids, and Storage Session Organizer and Chair: Lindsay Anderson, landerson@cornell.edu Distributed energy resources (DERs) include customer- side generation, energy storage, flexible loads, and distribution- side sensing devices, and may or may not have coordinated operation as microgrids. There is an emerging consensus that DERs will play a critical role in providing services to the power system. Flexible loads can be scheduled to balance variable generation, microgrids and strategic storage can provide reliability and security and distributed sensing can offer unprecedented system visibility. Integration of DERs requires continuing innovation in control, optimization, and modeling, and technology to enable the participation in regulation and balancing services, ancillary service markets and distribution system management.
This session invites technical papers presenting new approaches, models and methods for planning, architecting, and operating interconnected power systems with significant DER penetration. We are especially interested in papers that focus on the role of DERs in responding to variability and uncertainty on both the transmission and distribution systems, as well as papers that study the economic aspects of integrating DERs. Minitrack Chair: Judy Cardell Picker Engineering Program 352 Ford Hall Smith College Northampton, MA 01063 Tel: (413) 585-4222 Email: jcardell@smith.edu
Markets, Policy, and Computation Public concerns about the adverse environmental and health effects of using fossil fuels and nuclear power to generate electricity have led to a greater reliance on renewable sources of generation that are inherently variable and uncertain. This trend is accompanied by increased proliferation of distributed resources, storage and smart grid technologies that facilitate demand response and greater observability of the grid. As a result the electric power industry faces new challenges in planning and operation of the power system that require new market mechanisms and computational optimization tools to achieve productive and allocative efficiencies. A key concept in addressing the new challenges associated with renewables integration and in mobilizing a diverse resource portfolio to mitigate the uncertainty and variability of these intermittent resources is flexibility. Hence the central theme of this mini track revolves around identifying metrics and the needs for flexibility based on available data, characterizing market products and public policies that incentivizes flexibility and optimizing resource use to meet flexibility needs so as to assure system reliability in face of uncertainty at least cost. The first session focuses on identifying the needs for flexibility and market constructs that will facilitate the mobilization procurement and deployment of resources that provide flexibility (including generation, storage, transmission and demand). The second session focuses on computational aspects of optimizing the planning, operation and procurement of a diverse resource portfolio, including power flow and unit commitment optimization under uncertainty. Session 1: Requirements and Markets for Flexibility Session Organizer and Session Chair: Le Xie, lxie@ece.tmu.edu High penetration levels of variable resources such as wind and solar power introduce significant uncertainty and variability into the power system and electricity markets creating high and unpredictable ramps in net load. Such ramps present a great challenge for system operators who must maintain reliable operation and efficient markets with simultaneous maximum utilization of renewable energy. Furthermore, procuring and maintaining sufficient reserves on hand in anticipation of such ramps often requires out of merit dispatch and high levels of costly reserves. Incentivizing investment and market participation by diverse resources on the supply and demand side who can provide flexibility economically requires new market mechanisms and operating procedures. This session aims to bring together leading researchers for comprehensive discussion of appropriate metrics and market constructs for flexibility in electric energy systems. The flexibility will be inherently multi- time- scale, and can be extracted from supply/demand side, energy storage, as well as the delivery infrastructure of the electric energy system (e.g. topology control and FACTS). Papers that discuss innovative assessment and provision of flexibility from both theoretical and empirical perspectives are encouraged. Session 2: Frontiers in Power Systems Optimization Session Organizer and Session Chair: Richard D. Tabors, rtabors@tcr- us.com The evolution of the Electric Power system with increased data and information being available for planning, operations and control is presenting new challenges in optimization and computation.
Furthermore the proliferation of intermittent and variable resources, distributed generation, storage and demand response requires new analytic tools capable of handling far greater levels of both temporal and spatial data and dealing with uncertainty and variability on the supply and demand side. Issues of meeting ramping requirements given greater penetration of renewable resources; of increased technology options that can provide flexibility in real time operations; and new sources of distributed generation and storage require advances in both the development and application of optimization tool. On the other hand recent progress in optimization theory and software development complimented by dramatic increases in the capability of low cost computer hardware opens the door for a new generation of software for Electric Power Systems that can address the above challenges through new problem formulations, algorithm design and utilization of high performance computing facilities. The objective of this session is to bring together papers focused on new problem formulations, algorithmic developments and computational advances focusing on improvements of solution quality and computational efficiency in optimization of planning, operation and market clearing for the electric power industry. Papers focusing on new approaches to power flow optimization, stochastic and robust unit commitment, topology control, chance constrained optimization and multi- objective programming are particularly encouraged. Minitrack Chair: Shmuel S. Oren University of California at Berkeley 4135 Etcheverry Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 Tel: (510) 908-3102 Email: oren@ieor.berkeley.edu
Monitoring, Control, and Protection This minitrack focuses on topics related to the monitoring, control, and protection of electric power systems for real- time operations and short- term operations planning. Innovations that focus on recent developments in the area of large- scale dynamic research for power systems and on hybrid and distributed control concepts for decentralized command and control of existing critical energy infrastructures are specifically sought for this year s program. Session 1: Large Scale Dynamics and Control Session Organizer and Session Chair Mani Venkatasubramanian, mani@eecs.wsu.edu Power system is a large- scale nonlinear system consisting of hundreds of dynamic components including synchronous generators and their controls, nonlinear loads, and complex power electronic devices such as in wind generators and in flexible transmission controllers. Modeling and simulation of the underlying large- scale differential- algebraic equations are essential for understanding fundamental questions in power system planning and operations. Recent measurement based real- time monitoring and control algorithms are providing a renewed look at the dynamic phenomena of interconnected power system through synchronized wide- area measurements in the form of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). With the availability of such large- scale synchronized measurements available in the power system today, there is an urgent need to combine model based power system dynamic research and measurement based monitoring and control algorithms towards advancing real- time operational reliability of electric power grids. Increased reactive power demands during unplanned for events such as from geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) can push the system towards voltage collapse scenarios. This session will showcase recent developments in the area of large- scale dynamic research in the power system area. (Expect 3 to 4 papers in this session) Session 2: Distributed Decision and Control Session Organizer and Session Chair: David P. Chassin, david.chassin@pnnl.gov This session addresses distributed control concepts that can be integrated into a more decentralized command and control of existing critical energy infrastructures. The world's developed economies will increasingly be required to manage heterogeneous and dispersed infrastructure- scale systems of systems such as our critical energy, power, computing and transportation systems. There is an emerging recognition of the need for new control techniques that will allow us to develop, test and integrate distributed resources with growing dispersed intelligence and diverging objectives. Papers will present new control theory, tools and testbeds that support the development of a sound scientific basis for controlling large- scale energy infrastructure using diverse resources including distributed generation and loads. They will address the fundamental obstacles to generalizable methodologies for controlling large- scale complex engineered systems while economically and reliably achieving evolving local and global performance objectives.
Minitrack Chair: Joseph H. Eto Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 1 Cyclotron Road Mailstop 90R4000 Berkeley, CA 94720-8136 Tel: (510) 486-7284 Email: JHEto@lbl.gov
Resilient Networks This minitrack focuses on enhancing the resilience of future electric power infrastructure. Advanced technologies will require sophisticated methods for understanding how they can be incorporated into increasingly complex and dynamic infrastructure. We invite papers that examine issues of resiliency and secure interoperability of future grid systems, and the associated computational and communication challenges associated with the power system. Session 1: Complex Infrastructure Interdependencies Session Organizer and Session Chair: Ian Dobson, Dobson, dobson@iastate.edu Blackouts of the electric grid not only deprive our society of electricity, but also can impair other essential networked infrastructures such as gas, communications, and water. Moreover, failures in other infrastructures can, in turn, propagate into the electrical grid. Further adverse infrastructure interactions can emerge as the infrastructures degrade. The combined cascading failure of electricity and other infrastructures greatly increases the discomfort, danger, and economic loss to society. These complex interactions are known anecdotally and by some simulations, but there are considerable challenges in modeling and coordinating the important interactions (possibly including human, market, or economic factors) and quantifying the adverse interactions so that their risk can be estimated, mitigated and controlled. The objective of this session is to describe new methods to analyze and quantify electric, gas, communications or water network outages and their interactions with each other so that they can be better mitigated. Approaches that are well informed both by the engineering, physics, economics and risk analysis of the combined infrastructure failures and by fields such as complex systems, complex networks, and probabilistic analyses of cascading that generalize to interacting networks are encouraged. Session 2: Big Data Analytics for Actionable Information in Power Systems Session Organizer and Chair: Bill Rosehart, rosehart@ucalgary.ca Utilities now have an unprecedented wealth of data, coming from a variety of sources such as demand response participants, PMUs, and enhanced SCADA systems, which if managed properly can provide opportunities to increase reliability and system performance. With the increased adoption of grid modernization, demand response programs, and distributed generation that is often renewable and intermittent system operators need to manage vast amounts of data, making big data analytics a requirement for future electrical energy systems. This session invites technical papers presenting new approaches, methods, and applications related to big data analytics in planning, designing and operating electric energy systems. This session will address some of the challenges and opportunities associated with big data in electrical energy systems, coming from a variety of sources such as demand response participants, PMUs, and enhanced SCADA systems.
Minitrack Chair: Jeffery E. Dagle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory P.O. Box 999, MS K1-85 Richland, WA 99352 Tel: (509) 375-3629 Email: jeff.dagle@pnnl.gov