PSERC Webinar on February 15, 2011

This presentation is on a PSERC project to create a vision of the future substation. The future substation design requires an understanding how both primary and secondary equipment may interact in the substation, how measurements from the primary system may be converted to secondary quantities by using multifunctional intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), and how the availability of new types of signal sensors may eliminate many of the drawbacks imposed by conventional instrument transformers. The design strategies are focused on reducing cost while maintaining the performance, or maintaining cost while improving performance. 

PSERC Webinar on February 1, 2011

In this talk I will review concepts, programs and technologies aimed at enlisting demand response that evolved since the early 80's. While the technology has reached a point where many of the early experimental programs and concepts have become feasible and cost effective, the economic paradigm for demand response has not changed much. While electricity is traded as a commodity at the wholesale level, at the retail level demand response programs can be framed as "quality of service differentiation". Given this premise I will describe some economic paradigms for characterizing and pricing demand response programs that can underlie business models for intermediaries aggregating retail level load control into tradable wholesale market commodities.

PSERC Webinar for March 1, 2011

Compared to the conventional grid, the smart grid requires active participation of consumers to improve the quality and reliability of power delivery. The increase in consumer participation is expected from the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), commonly known as the smart meter, which has the capability of supporting various functions beyond that of recording energy usage. One of the primary objectives of the AMI is to allow load and cost management for the utility. This is envisioned partly through a communication system implemented between the smart meter and consumer equipment, currently deployed using wireless networking solutions such as ZigBee. Due to the shared nature of the wireless medium, however, these deployments face security challenges and interference issues, which must be addressed, taking into account the interests of both the utility company and the customer. Recent consumer billing complaints and subsequent investigations on wireless-based smart meter deployments highlight the criticality and timeliness of addressing these issues. In this talk I will take a comprehensive look at wireless security in the smart meter-based home-area network scenario by identifying a wide range of possible attacks. Further, I will discuss countermeasures that can be used by both the utility company as well as the customer, and integrate them into a common framework that can be agreed to by both.

PSERC webinar series: 3/15, 3/29, 4/5

Greenhouse gas limits are already in effect in parts of Europe and North America, and more are expected in the near future. Electric power systems operating under these restrictions are required to limit their production of green house gases. Limits are implemented in one or more of several ways including a carbon tax, a carbon cap-and trade system, and renewable portfolio standards. In this research we investigated the effects on an electric power system operating under such regulations. We examined:

- AC Optimal Power Flow Studies in Reduced-Carbon Electric Power System Operations
- The Impact of Carbon Cap and Trade Regulation on Congested Electricity Market Equilibrium
- Optimal Generation Scheduling in a Carbon Dioxide Allowance Market Environment.

This webinar series will provide an overview of the research results.

PSERC Webinar on May 3

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) have been identified as a vital technology to reduce carbon emissions and dependence on petroleum. The emerging fleet of PEVs will introduce a considerable amount of additional load on the power system. We analyze the electric energy and power consumption of light-duty PEVs under uncontrolled and controlled charging scenarios. The analysis is based on information extracted from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, which collects information on the travel behavior of a national representative sample of U.S. households. For controlled charging, a PEV aggregator that participates in the wholesale electricity market is considered. The aggregator’ s objective is to maximize energy trading-related profits. A minimum-cost load scheduling algorithm is designed. The algorithm determines the purchase of energy in the day-ahead market based on the forecast electricity price and PEV power demands. Also, a dynamic dispatch algorithm is developed for distributing the purchased energy to PEVs on the operating day. Simulation results are used to evaluate the proposed algorithms, and to demonstrate the potential impact of an aggregated PEV fleet on the power system.

PSERC Webinar on June 7, 2011

This seminar will describe results of efforts to perform long-term energy and transportation system infrastructure planning at a national level, in terms of a new software application and results of using that software on data characterizing US energy and transportation infrastructure. The software, called NETPLAN, is a multi-objective optimizer that models national energy systems (electric generation and transmission, and the fuel systems which supply them), together the transportation systems used to move both freight and passengers. NETPLAN identifies 40-year infrastructure investment strategies, at the national level, which are “ good” in terms of low capital and operating costs, low environmental impact (including CO2 emissions), and high resiliency. A notion of resiliency is introduced based on the system’ s ability to limit variability of operational cost under very large disruptions such as the 2005 Katrina hurricanes. Significant effort has gone into developing a database of existing and future national infrastructures which causes NETPLAN to be computation-intensive, a problem that has been addressed via use of parallelized high performance computer clusters. Some of the questions this software is being used to address include:

•   What is the best combination of wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, gas, clean-coal, and hydrogen-based technologies to reduce CO2 emissions?
•   What technologies and topologies should be used in designing a national electric transmission superhighway system?
•   What is the best mix of electricity, petroleum, and biofuels to supply our automotive needs?
•   To what extent can electric high-speed rail reduce energy use and transportation-related emissions while competing with air and highway travel?

This seminar is based in part on work performed in an NSF-funded project called “ National Energy and Transportation for Sustainability, Cost, & Resiliency in the 21rst Century” (NETSCORE21).

 

PSERC Webinar on August 10, 2011

The rapidly increasing levels of renewable energy sources, particularly variable sources such as wind and solar, coupled with the expected increases in demand-side participation and deployment of electricity vehicles are all pointing towards a dramatic change to the electricity grids along with significant research challenges and opportunities. This webinar will explore some of these challenges, propose possible research directions, and highlight opportunities for researchers, industry and government entities.

There are several possible directions for the electricity grids of the future. Here the hypothesis is that the existing large scale electricity grids will grow even further and there will be need for ever increasing amounts of long distance high capacity transmission. That system will grow in scale, geographically, and in absolute energy terms. This vision of the future is also compatible with a large deployment of localized energy sources.

The challenges for this future vision are building more large-scale transmission to complement the existing infrastructure and operating this future grid in a more flexible and dynamic manner at both a physical and institutional level. The challenges span technical to social topics. They include (1) the development of innovative transmission technologies, e.g., High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC); (2) newer more innovative planning and operating techniques that push the performance of existing and future grids to their limits; (3) understanding and managing grids with increasing levels of asynchronous generation; (4) development of new market and institutional structures that can accommodate larger penetrations of renewable energy and (5) recognition of the changing nature of consumer needs. The social aspects (e.g., public acceptance of transmission) will be noted.

PSERC Webinar on September 6, 2011

California's administration, legislature, and energy regulators have adopted aggressive targets for renewable energy which will result in profound changes in markets and system operations as the resource portfolio shifts from heavy reliance on natural gas as a fuel for electric generation to intermittent, often remote, resources. As part of determining workable modeling approaches as changes in market design are considered, this webinar examines the use of a 240-bus model as a realistic test system for the California and WECC market.
Demand response and energy storage technologies are important contributors to the flexibility that will be needed in future markets, and provide an illustration of this analysis. One related issue is the necessary level of detail for modeling unit commitment. The California ISO's new market structure, launched in 2009, combines advanced unit commitment and dispatch processes with recognition of physical characteristics of the transmission system and generation resources. Another modeling issue has been to anticipate whether market impacts will result from increased use of dynamic transfers (dynamic scheduling and pseudo-ties) to bring renewable resources into the CAISO market. As the CAISO responds by making additional improvements in its unit commitment and dispatch processes, workable test systems will be valuable tools for market design.

PSERC Webinar on September 27, 2011

The Smart Grid Initiative (SGI) encourages integration of storage and peak-shaving technologies including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) to the electric distribution system for enhancing performance and efficiency. PHEV sales in the US are expected to significantly increase in the car and light-truck market primarily due to their potential to lower fuel costs by reducing fossil fuel consumption and to lower emissions. In this talk, a methodology is proposed to determine the impact of penetration of a PHEV fleet with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities on electric distribution systems. The methodology builds on the results of an existing probabilistic simulation of daily behavioral characteristics of a PHEV fleet to determine charging patterns of the fleet vehicles (by Meliopoulos et al.), which are then used for utility peak-shaving purposes through a linear programming (LP) optimization method. The charging patterns of the simulated PHEV fleet are used to determine the impact of PHEVs on the reliability of a distribution test system under islanded mode of operation, i.e., a microgrid. This webinar is based on research in the PSERC project “ Implications of the Smart Grid Initiative on Distribution Engineering.”

PSERC Webinar on October 4, 2011

Power grids are increasingly stressed, having to integrate renewables, and moving towards some form of distributed control. All of these factors, and others, require much better communications. Supporting data delivery services must support a wide range of delivery characteristics (e.g., latency, rate, availability/criticality) and operate on ranges of geographic scales and data volumes. Further, many emerging applications require extremely low latencies and extremely high availability, ones that cannot be completely met by commercial technologies directly. In this seminar, we overview such emerging applications and their requirement(s). We then discuss practical implementation issues involving and providing such advanced data delivery services. Finally, we overview the emerging NASPInet as well as our GridStat data delivery system which implements NASPInet.

PSERC Webinar on October 26, 2011

Simulation of the transient stability problem, which is the assessment of the short term (several to 30 seconds) angular and voltage stability of the power system following a disturbance, is of vital importance. For some portions of the North American power grids, such as the Western Electric Coordinating Council (WECC), transient stability has always been an important consideration, while for other portions it is of growing concern due partially to the widespread integration of wind generation. It is widely known in the industry that different transient stability packages can give substantially different results for the same (or at least similar) system models. This presentation presents results from a PSERC project that investigated the source of these differences. The presentation will also provide a discussion of transient stability validation methodologies.

PSERC Webinar on November 1, 2011

One of the challenges in assessing the impact of wind power on a power system is representation of the myriad possible scenarios to consider. As wind penetration becomes significant the number of generating sites must increase, and it is the combination of these stochastic sources that is of particular importance to system operators. The use of the multi-period SuperOPF modeling framework allows the co-optimization of generating resources and reserves over a horizon spanning several time intervals. The main advantage of such formulation is that it allows consistent decisions for assets that involve inter-temporal tradeoffs, such as storage units and controllable demand, as well as ancillary services, such as ramping. Current case studies assess the impact of sixteen distinct wind farms on a reduction of the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), with focus on New York and New England, and the question of how to represent the possible combinations of wind generation in a tractable number of scenarios is considered. In this webinar, we will describe the approach used to reduce the possible scenarios and estimate the transitions between them. Results of the SuperOPF case study based on these inputs will also be presented.

PSERC Webinar on December 13, 2011

There is a growing interdependence between energy and water and the sustainable infrastructure applications needed for producing or treating both. It takes significant amounts of energy to treat, process, and move water and wastewater. In turn, thermal generation (e.g., coal plants, natural gas plants, concentrating solar plants and nuclear plants) requires tremendous water resources to keep plants running smoothly. With growing global populations (the United Nations estimates that the world's population will go from 6.7 billion today to 10 billion in 30 years), climate change, antiquated energy and water infrastructure and a finite amount of resources (we can't just create more water and fossil fuels are not renewable), we need to reduce the amount of energy to treat, process, and move water and wastewater, and reduce the amount of water used for thermal power generation.