PSERC Webinar on January 22, 2013

The PSERC Future Grid Initiative is a DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems” to investigate the requirements of an electric grid with high penetrations of sustainable energy systems and heavy reliance on cyber systems for sensing and communication. This webinar will provide an overview of the accomplishments of work done in the thrust area “ Electric Energy Challenges of the Future” on the following tasks:
• Integrating Transmission and Distribution Engineering Eventualities (Gerald Heydt): to bring together research and analysis of several energy transmission and distribution eventualities and examine ‘ what if’ a given eventuality is implemented in the power system.
• A National Transmission Overlay (Jim McCalley and Dionysios Aliprantis): to design a US national transmission overlay and develop an associated design process to facilitate the growth of wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and clean-coal generation over the next 40 years.
• Robust and Dynamic Reserve Requirements (Kory Hedman): to investigate opportunities to greatly improve upon today’ s methods of determining reserve levels and reserve zones.
• Wide Area Control Systems (Mani Venkatasubramanian): to formulate, design, and investigate voltage controllers, oscillatory controls, and coordinated wide-area angle stability controls.
More information about the Future Grid Initiative is available on the PSERC website.

PSERC Webinar on February 5, 2013

The PSERC Future Grid Initiative is a DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems” to investigate the requirements of an electric grid with high penetrations of sustainable energy systems and heavy reliance on cyber systems for sensing and communication. This webinar will provide an overview of the accomplishments of work done in the thrust area “ Control Paradigms of the Future” on the following tasks:• Hierarchical Coordinated Control of Wind Energy Resources and Storage for Electromechanical Stability Enhancement of the Grid: To develop control methodologies and designs that address the problem of maintaining grid electromechanical stability as the percentage of power production from synchronous generators, the traditional grid stabilizing mechanism, decreases in the coming decade.• Requirements for Hierarchical Coordinated Control and Protection of the Smart Grid: To define the overall concept for hierarchical coordinated control and protection of the smart grid assuming that a hierarchical and distributed structure will be used in the future grid.• Hierarchical Coordinated Protection of the Smart Grid with High Penetration of Renewable Resources: To define the three hierarchical coordinated layers of predictive protection, inherently adaptive protection, and corrective protection in the future grid, using real-life systems scenarios with modeling and simulation to demonstrate findings.More information about the Future Grid Initiative is available on the PSERC website.

PSERC Webinar on February 19, 2013

The PSERC Future Grid Initiative is a DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems” to investigate the requirements of an electric grid with high penetrations of sustainable energy systems and heavy reliance on cyber systems for sensing and communication. This webinar will provide an overview of the accomplishments of work done in the thrust area “ Renewable Energy Integration: Technological and Market Design Challenges” on the following tasks:• Direct and Telemetric Coupling of Renewable Energy Resources with Flexible Loads: To devise optimal strategies for the use of contracted renewable resources, supplemented by spot electricity purchased from the grid, to serve such flexible loads and to explore business models for serving such loads or for aggregating load flexibility to provide wholesale balancing energy and reserves• Mitigating Renewables Intermittency Through Non-Disruptive Distributed Load Control: For demand-side flexibility to support variable renewable electricity generation, (1) to develop and assess the potential of large-scale modeling strategies for aggregated load state estimation; (2) to develop novel control strategies that weigh the cost of control at the local level against benefits at the system level; and (3) to develop strategies to evaluate the end-use impact of the control actions, and use these impacts to understand the cost to recruit customers into this type of program.• Probabilistic Simulation Methodology for Evaluating the Impact of Renewables Intermittency on Operation and Planning: To develop a comprehensive simulation methodology to quantify the economic and reliability impacts on overall grid performance and operation of storage applications in systems with high penetrations of variable wind and solar power generation resources.• Planning and Market Design for Using Dispatchable Loads to Meet Renewable Portfolio Standards and Emissions Reduction Targets: 1) To develop a unifying framework to characterize different types of dispatchable loads (e.g., electric vehicles and HVAC systems with thermal storage or on-demand temperature management; 2) to determine the engineering and economic feasibility of aggregating dispatchable loads to provide systems services (including frequency response, frequency regulation, load/generation following); and 3) to design a market that provides the correct incentives for managing the systems services provided by energy aggregators.More information about the Future Grid Initiative is available on the PSERC website.

PSERC Webinar on April 2, 2013

The PSERC Future Grid Initiative is a DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems” to investigate the requirements of an electric grid with high penetrations of sustainable energy systems and heavy reliance on cyber systems for sensing and communication. This webinar will provide an overview of the accomplishments of work done in the thrust area “ Engineering Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems” on the following tasks:• Resiliency With Respect To Low Frequency, High Consequence Events: To research grid resiliency to geomagnetic storms, including the development of power system analysis techniques and tools for assessing grid resiliency and adverse impact mitigation options.• Operational and Planning Considerations for Resiliency: To engineer power transmission system resilience to cascading failure blackouts by developing metrics, cascading failure models, methods of statistical processing, and risk communication methods, incorporating the results of case studies using observed and simulated power system data.• Improved Power Grid Resiliency through Interactive System Control: To design and test corrective controls that incorporate appropriate synchronized wide area measurements to enhance grid resiliency and robustness with respect to increased penetration of renewable resources and the resulting uncertainty arising from those resources.More information about the Future Grid Initiative is available on the PSERC website.

PSERC Webinar on April 16, 2013

The PSERC Future Grid Initiative is a DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems” to investigate the requirements of an electric grid with high penetrations of sustainable energy systems and heavy reliance on cyber systems for sensing and communication. This webinar will provide an overview of the accomplishments of work done in the thrust area “ Computational Challenges and Analysis Under Increasingly Dynamic and Uncertain Electric Power System Conditions” on the following tasks:• Decision-Making Framework for the Future Grid: to develop and demonstrate a decision-making framework for the future grid that- ensures that all the goals of the future grid can be met- covers all relevant spatial and temporal scales- addresses decision complexity through layered abstractions- uncovers the gaps and technological needs as the industry evolves into the future grid.• Real-Time PMU-Based Tools for Monitoring Operational Reliability: To develop real-time PMU-based tools for helping operators with operational reliability assessment, including system loadability condition monitoring, transient stability analysis, and real-time line model and equivalent parameter updating.• Hierarchical Probabilistic Coordination and Optimization of DERs and Smart Appliances: To develop an hierarchical stochastic optimization method and a supporting infrastructure to capture the potential benefits from levelizing total load, reducing losses substantially, providing ancillary services, and maximizing system reliability in distribution.• Computational Issues of Optimization for Planning: To develop improved computational methods for long-term resource planning under uncertainty in a model familiar to grid planners while seeking solutions to tractable enhancements in planning models to enable analysis of changing goals in coordinated markets.More information about the Future Grid Initiative is available on the PSERC website.

PSERC Webinar on March 5, 2013

The PSERC Future Grid Initiative is a DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems” to investigate the requirements of an electric grid with high penetrations of sustainable energy systems and heavy reliance on cyber systems for sensing and communication. This webinar will provide an overview of the accomplishments of work done in the thrust area “ Workforce Development” on the following tasks:• Comprehensive Educational Tools for Reliability Modeling and Evaluation of the Emerging Smart Grid: To develop educational material for teaching reliability modeling and evaluation of the emerging power grid with heavy penetration of renewables and massive deployment of computer and communication technologies.• PSERC Academy - A Virtual Library of Thousands of Short Videos: To create an online library of short (i.e., 15-20 minute) videos on various topics of sustainable energy systems, smart grid and power engineering, and on important background topics required to understand these concepts.• A Course in Energy Economics and Policy: To develop a masters-level graduate course on the Policy and Economics of Energy Markets designed for both non-economists with backgrounds in energy technology and engineering, and economists interested in applications to energy.• Smart Grid Education for Students and Professionals: (1) To build a comprehensive educational package that will reach out to educators, students, practicing engineers, managers, legislators, public officials, etc. (2) To write a text book and prepare a set of supplemental PowerPoint presentations that may be used• Energy Processing for Smart Grid Technology: To develop a university course, with materials, on smart grid technology for undergraduates and first year graduate students.• Course Development, “ Critical Infrastructure Security - The Emerging Smart Grid” : To develop a university course that with multi-disciplinary content from areas of data communication, computing, control, and cyber-security that provides the necessary background for engineering students to work on problems, issues and cyber-security challenges associated with the smart grid.More information about the Future Grid Initiative is available on the PSERC website.

PSERC Webinar on March 19, 2013

Parallel computing offers a significant advance in computing power needed in the increasingly computationally-intensive environment of power system operations. This talk introduces parallel computing, and its need and applications in various industries including the electric power industry. The requirements for adopting parallel computing will be discussed along with alternative approaches for high performance computing. Practical challenges faced in transitioning from legacy systems to parallel computing architectures will be identified. The presentation includes an overview of different parallel computing architectures and programming models, along with key design aspects of parallel programming important to its adoption, such as computer load balancing, communication, synchronization, and task granularity. It also explores various libraries, state-of-the-art parallel programming languages for large-scale code development and productivity over a few to tens of thousands of processors.

An example of use of parallel computing in power system analysis is given. Results are reported for use of a parallel power system dynamic simulator for dynamic contingency analysis of thousands of contingencies in a large test system. Results are presented for different computing architectures, and for different programming models and programming languages. This demonstration of parallel computing takes into account crucial design considerations such as computing load balancing and communication overhead.

PSERC Webinar on May 7, 2013

Using wind power to supply up to 20%, or more, of electrical demand is increasingly popular in policy mandates, yet is relatively untested in terms of actual system and market operations. This presentation will investigate the concept of self-reserves, wherein wind generators withhold a portion of forecasted energy production, via their hour-ahead schedule, in order to minimize dispatch deviations in real-time. This approach takes advantage of the natural hedge available in correlation between wind forecast level and error. The wind energy withheld from the hour-ahead schedule can be used to mitigate a shortfall in wind production in real-time (measured in relation to the hour-ahead schedule). Alternatively, if the real-time wind generation is greater than the scheduled amount, the reserved wind energy is available to the system for ancillary services.
Power system simulations use an integrated modeling framework based on optimal power flow modeling with Monte Carlo simulation, that captures the uncertainty in wind generation and demand. Simulation results quantify power system performance parameters in terms of cost, price, losses, generator dispatch patterns, amount of wind energy spilled, demand response and CO2 emissions. Initial results with the use of wind self-reserves show that use of this approach can be effective in increasing the amount of wind power the system uses, by reducing the overall amount of wind energy spilled. When used in conjunction with demand response, wind self-reserves can be effective in reducing negative system impacts of wind variability.

PSERC Webinar on September 17, 2013

In order to monitor and maintain operational reliability, power system operators perform several static security analyses. For example, the results of online N-1 contingency analysis help operators determine whether or not the system will meet operational reliability requirements in case of outage in any one particular asset (e.g., a generator or a transmission line), and further whether or not corrective actions, such as generation re-dispatch in a constrained system, are required. These studies may include repeated computations, for each credible contingency, of power flow solutions using the full nonlinear power flow model or a linearized model. To reduce the computational burden of evaluating repeated power flow solutions, linear sensitivity distribution factors (DFs), such as injection shift factors (ISFs), power transfer distribution factors (PTDFs), and line outage distribution factors (LODFs), are used to predict the effect of an operating point change on the system. Existing approaches to computing DFs typically employ so-called DC approximations, which can provide fast contingency screening. They do not, however, have the flexibility of adapting to changes in network topology or generation and load variations, which can all affect the actual linear sensitivities.
In this talk, we will discuss a method to compute linear sensitivity distribution factors (DFs) in near real-time. The method does not rely on the system power flow model. Instead, it uses only high-frequency synchronized data collected from phasor measurement units to estimate the injection shift factors. Beyond eliminating the power flow model, we show that the proposed measurement-based approach provides more accurate results than the model-based approximations and can adapt to unexpected system topology and operating point changes. Through numerical examples, we illustrate the advantages of our proposed DF estimation approach over the conventional model-based one in the context of contingency analysis and generation re-dispatch.

PSERC Webinar on September 3, 2013

With the rapid growth of variable energy resources, such as wind and solar, the role of energy storage in electric power systems becomes increasingly important. This webinar will provide an overview of the current status of grid-scale energy storage technologies and their many applications in power systems. The main focus will be on the bulk energy storage systems and their applications in the transmission grid. The presentation will cover different services that can be provided by energy storage to the power system with an emphasis on ancillary services. The needs and value of those services for system operation will also be addressed. The role of hydropower and pumped storage hydro technologies in integrating variable renewable resources will also be covered.

PSERC Webinar on October 1, 2013

This talk will report on the development and use of an Integrated Retail and Wholesale (IRW) Power System Test Bed to explore the IRW effects of increased Demand Response (DR) in the form of price-responsive retail demand. An important barrier to DR implementation to date has been the lack of a compelling business model that accounts for the interests and concerns of all stakeholders. The IRW Test Bed permits the business case for DR proposals to be carefully explored within a reasonably realistic simulation environment, thus providing a bridge between theory and commercial application. Illustrative findings will be presented for a test case in which retail households have smart A/C system controllers responsive to energy prices.The home page of the IRW Project is http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/irwprojecthome.htm.

PSERC Webinar on November 19, 2013

A defining feature of a smart grid is its ability to adapt to changing operating conditions and contingencies by leveraging advanced sensing, communication, and networking capabilities. However, relying networking for grid monitoring and real time operation comes with increasing security risks of cyber-attacks.In this talk, we consider man-in-the-middle attacks on the power grid where an adversary manipulates analog and digital data with the goal of misleading the control center with an incorrect network topology and operating state. Two types of attacks are considered. The first type of attacks avoid detection by the control center and covertly change the system operating state. The second type of attacks openly attack the control center but hide the actual source of attack. We discuss the impacts of man-in-the-middle attacks on market operations and possible counter measures of such attacks.

PSERC Webinar on October 15, 2013

In this webinar we introduce an idea for a new tool for voltage stability assessment using semidefinite programming. The tool will be useful for preparing strategies to mitigate the risk of voltage collapse. Employing a convex relaxation of the power flow equations, we are able to quickly determine voltage stability margins in terms of the traditional maximum power transfer capability metric. With this knowledge, operators would know how voltage stability limited the system is in being able to make power transfers. Operational decisions that increase the voltage stability margin would result in higher power transfer capability.The method is valuable for analyzing contingency scenarios to assure grid resiliency. Importantly, the method can identify contingencies for which the system would experience voltage collapse. In those cases, the method leads to a loss of solution, and provides a negative power margin. We present an overview of the theory supporting the new method, outline the algorithm that would be used to develop a tool based on the method, and demonstrate its effectiveness on power systems of various sizes.

PSERC Webinar on November 5, 2013

In this talk we present the empirical study on the benefits of combining look-ahead dynamic dispatch with price responsive demands for integration of variable energy resources in Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Based on substation level demand response data and site-specific wind generation data from ERCOT, algorithms are developed to quantify (1) the price elasticity of demand for typical users, and (2) the economic and security benefits of look-ahead dispatch with price responsive loads. We also study the impact of time-coupled look-ahead dispatch on locational marginal prices.

PSERC Webinar on December 10, 2013

Large penetration levels of distributed renewable resources in power distribution systems, especially photovoltaic (PV) generators, may require significant changes to the design, operation, protection and control of the distribution systems. In order to understand and analyze the impact of high penetration of inverter-interfaced PV with sophisticated grid support features, it is essential to have a distribution system analysis tool capable of modeling the complex static and dynamic behavior of these devices and the distribution system under a wide range of time scales. This webinar will discuss the capabilities of popular analytical tools, and introduce some new techniques, algorithms and models for static, quasi-static and transient analysis. In particular the implementation of feeder, PV and load models in static and transient analysis tools directly from GIS and AMI data, network reduction techniques, and transient simulation using dynamic phasor approach will be discussed. The use of these methods in the study of an actual high penetration PV implementation in a feeder in AZ, and the validation with extensive field measurements will be presented.