PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, January 24, 2012

We define a national transmission overlay as a high capacity, multi-regional transmission grid that spans all three interconnections, designed as a single integrated system to provide economic and environmental benefits to the nation. The objective of this webinar and associated white paper is to identify benefits to building a national transmission overlay, to lay out essential elements to facilitate continued dialogue on this topic, and to frame possible paths by which it could be realized. A preliminary study illustrated that a national transmission overlay, under high renewable penetration and low CO2 emissions, could result in cost-reduction of between a quarter trillion and a half trillion dollars over a 40-year period, while increasing infrastructure resilience and flexibility.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, February 7, 2012

One thing that virtually all of the information hierarchy components must deal with is cyber and physical security. This webinar (and the associated white paper) focuses on identifying a comprehensive set of cyber security challenges and the need for security at multiple levels of the cyber-physical power system, namely, information security, ICT infrastructure security, and application-level security. It identifies cyber security research issues beyond the traditional IT security issues. Example of these research issues are: (i) cyber attack risk modeling and risk mitigation, (ii) attack-resilient monitoring, protection and control algorithms, (iii) defense against coordinated cyber attacks, (iv) AMI infrastructure security, (v) trust management and attack attributions, and (vi) simulation models, data sets, test bed evaluations.There is a need for going beyond (N-1) contingency criteria to deal with coordinated cyber attacks. Also, traditional models and algorithms (that are robust against random naturally occurring faults) are inadequate to deal with malicious cyber attacks, and hence the need for development of novel models and attack-resilient algorithms across generation, transmission, and distribution systems. Finally, attack deterrence, prevention, detection, mitigation, and attribution are linked.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, February 21, 2012

The objective of this webinar is to present the significant near- and long-term unresolved environmental issues relevant to the future electric grid and to summarize the technologies that will help resolve them. These issues include greenhouse gas mitigation, climate change adaptation, and availability of water for electric generation. Technologies that may help resolve the critical issues include fuel switching (coal to natural gas), carbon capture and storage, nuclear fission generation, renewable technologies, energy storage, energy efficiency improvements for transmission/distribution systems and end users, and demand response.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, March 6, 2012

This presentation will talk about these research challenges and needs to hasten the realization of benefits attributed to the AMI application scenario. Additionally it will talk about specific future actions needed at a federal level in terms of communication needs and integration options for meeting AMI goals that include: (i) encouraging more far-reaching investments in back-haul communication infrastructures, and (ii) developing information security and privacy regulations to protect consumers and guide utility reactions to threats and malicious behavior.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, March 13, 2012

Geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) have the potential to severely disrupt operations of the electric grid by causing high geomagnetically induced dc currents (GICs) that can lead to transformer saturation resulting in large reactive power losses.  Yet to-date power engineers have had few, if any, tools to help them assess the impact of GMDs on their systems.  This presentation will explain how the impacts of GMDs can be integrated into power flow analysis software.  Using such an integrated approach, power engineers can study the impact of GMDs on their systems, allowing for the study of mitigation strategies.  Example strategies considered include the installation of GIC blocking devices and the impact of operational changes to reduce GICs.  Example results are presented for a large-scale utility system. 

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, March 20, 2012

The growing penetration of renewable generation technologies coupled to the grid through power electronic interfaces, and the potential for future growth of electrical storage similarly coupled through power electronics, raise new opportunities and challenges for primary and secondary control in the electric power system. In this context, we need to fundamentally re-examine the long-standing premises of primary and secondary control in the grid. We also need to consider both the capabilities of the new “ control actuators” available to us (i.e., renewable generation, supplemented by power electronic coupled storage), as well as the wider system objectives to be achieved by the control. This approach will offer solutions far superior to simply trying to force new generation and storage technologies to behave like the old.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, April 17, 2012

The objective of the presentation and accompanying white paper is to identify the strengths and weak-nesses associated with centralized generation (CG) and distributed generation (DG) infrastructure for the future electric grid system, including environmental impact. This will involve the development of indices for an economical scale study of DG relative to CG, and consider which is the most cost-effective to ac-commodate new markets. In order to assess the robustness of DG and CG under different load conditions, different indices for measuring the combination of CG/DG with respect to its sustainability and resilience to handle unforeseen events. It also provides a national roadmap towards identifying the right path for-ward in terms of which combination of DG resources and CG would make sense. This webinar is based on one of nine white papers in the project “ The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems: An Initiative of the Power Systems Engineering Research Center” funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, April 3, 2012

The synchrophasor technology is emerging as an enabling technology to facilitate both information interaction as well as energy interaction between providers and customers, and help revolutionize the power system. In particular, it is critical to ensure reliable and secure communication systems for synchrophasor data. In this presentation and the accompanying white paper, we identify a few important problems in this fundamental building block in the smart grid. This webinar is based on one of nine white papers in the project “ The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems: An Initiative of the Power Systems Engineering Research Center” funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, May 22, 2012

In this presentation and accompanying white paper, we will first review the standards currently used by the industry to ensure stable operations and acceptable quality of service. We will next pose the problem of designing specifications and protocols for enabling more flexible manage-ment of diverse energy resources without endangering system stability. The role of protection, control and communications in implementing stable operations in future electric energy systems operated in highly uncertain environment will be particularly assessed. Examples of open ques-tions and possible future solutions will be provided in this document.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar Series, June 5, 2012

The electric grid in the United States has evolved over the past century from a series of small independent community-based systems to one of the largest and most complex cyber-physical systems today. The established conditions that made the electric grid an engineering marvel are being challenged by major changes, the most important being the social economic incentive to reduce carbon emissions, a greater utilization of renewable energy, and the need to increase consumer participation. This talk discusses aspects of the computation and information architectures of a future smart grid that is potentially highly dynamic, heterogeneous, and interactive. We discuss some of the fundamental issues on the information gathering, fusion, and decision architectures that exploit the available and timely information.

PSERC Webinar on September 4, 2012

RE Futures is an initial investigation of the extent to which renewable energy supply can meet the electricity demands of the contiguous United States over the next several decades. This study explores the implications and challenges of very high renewable electricity generation levels: from 30% up to 90% (focusing on 80%) of all U.S. electricity generation from renewable tech-nologies in 2050. At such high levels of renewable electricity penetration, the unique characteris-tics of some renewable resources, specifically geographical distribution and variability and un-certainty in output, pose challenges to the operability of the nation's electric system.The study focuses on key technical implications of this environment from a national perspective, exploring whether the U.S. power system can supply electricity to meet customer demand on an hourly basis with high levels of renewable electricity, including variable wind and solar generation. The study also identifies some of the potential economic, environmental, and social implications of deploying and integrating high levels of renewable electricity in the U.S. The full report and associated supporting information is available at: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re_futures/.

PSERC Webinar on October 2, 2012

This webinar will describe the modeling and analysis of a distribution feeder in Arizona with a high penetration of distributed photovoltaic systems along with preliminary validation with field measurements. The model corresponds to an actual PV and DAS installation by Arizona Public Service as part of the Flagstaff Community Power project in a 10 mile long feeder with about 3300 customers and about 125 rooftop residential PV systems and two large scale PV systems. The total installed PV capacity of 1.5 MW corresponds to more than 30% peak penetration. Modeling of the feeder conductors and equipment using GIS data, loads using AMI data and PV systems using measured PV output from extensive data acquisition systems will be presented in detail. Interesting case studies using time series power flow under different feeder conditions and protection coordination will be presented.

PSERC Webinar on September 18, 2012

Polymeric materials containing nanometer (nm) size particles are being introduced to provide compact shapes for low and medium voltage insulation equipment. The nanocomposites may provide superior electrical performance when compared with those available currently, such as lower dielectric losses and increased dielectric strength, tracking and erosion resistance, and sur-face hydrophobicity. All of the above mentioned benefits can be achieved at a lower filler con-centration (< 10%) than conventional microfillers (40-60%). Also, the uniform shapes of nanofillers provide a better electrical stress distribution as compared to irregular shaped microcomposites which can have high internal electric stress, which could be a problem for de-vices with active electrical parts. Improvement in electrical performance due to addition of nanofillers in an epoxy matrix has been evaluated in this PSERC research project. The results will be presented.

PSERC Webinar on October 16, 2012

The recent advances in the state of the art of storage technology have led to wider deployment of storage technologies. In this project we developed models and a simulation methodology for ana-lyzing the effects of storage integration on transmission constrained electricity markets over longer-term periods. Our goal was to assess the use of storage as a system resource that provides the flexibility to mitigate the effects of integrating variable renewable energy sources into a pow-er system while improving overall system reliability. Storage also has the ability to provide energy and capacity-based ancillary services. In this webinar, we describe how the storage assessment methodologies can be implemented into practical tools to quantify how storage addresses the uncertainty of variable generation resources.

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar on Nov. 6, 2012

The effective transformation of the grid requires decisions based on identification and solution of major operating, planning, workforce, economic and public policy challenges. PSERC is conducting the DOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable Sustainable Energy Systems.” As a part of this Future Grid Initiative, in the Spring of 2012, a collection of white papers were written and webinars were presented. Peter Sauer will summarize the conclusions of those white papers and identify significant future research directions on the topic "The Information Hierarchy for the Future Grid."

PSERC Future Grid Initiative Webinar on Nov. 27, 2012.
The effective transformation of the grid requires decisions based onidentification and solution of major operating, planning, workforce,economic and public policy challenges. PSERC is conducting theDOE-funded project entitled "The Future Grid to Enable SustainableEnergy Systems.” As a part of this Future Grid Initiative, in the Springof 2012, a collection of white papers were written and webinars werepresented. Jim McCalley will summarize the conclusions of those whitepapers and identify significant future research directions on the topic"Grid Enablers of Sustainable Energy Systems."

PSERC Webinar on November 13, 2012

This webinar explores interoperability of standards and technical solutions as an important engineering objective. Sustainable deployment of integrative smart grid solutions depends on whether interoperability requirements facilitating the solutions are achieved in practice. Published interoperability requirements enable integrative research aimed at practical and successful smart grid deployment. Two examples are used to illustrate the importance of interoperability-related research from recently completed PSERC projects: Verifying Interoperability and Application Performance of PMUs and PMU-Enabled IEDs at the Device and System Level and The Smart Grid Needs - Model and Data Interoperability, and Unified Generalized State Estimator. The National Institute of Standards and Technology plays an important role in coordinating the work of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) in developing interoperability of standards and technical solutions with the assistance of thousands of professionals, many of whom are PSERC members. The transformation of SGIP into a global public-private partnership as of January 1, 2013 is discussed.

PSERC Webinar on December 11, 2012

This webinar will explore the future distribution system operations with active consumer participation. Future distribution level actions such as distributed generation, electric vehicle changing and automated feeder reconfiguration have the potential to affect the condition of distribution level components and distribution system reliability. The time varying nature of these resources will alter the operating patterns of distribution level equipment such as voltage regulators and distraction transformers and thus affecting their condition. Demand side management (DSM) through active consumer participation (dynamic feedback from customer side) together with storage has the potential to improve the distribution system reliability. An approach to manage the distribution system assets under, distributed generation, storage and active consumer participation would be explored in this webinar. Control strategies to achieve certain reliability benchmarks would be presented as examples.