Electric Energy Systems

The capabilities and characteristics of innovative supply-side and demand-side technologies in the electric power industry, as well as power system operations, implementation of microgrids, planning and markets are evolving rapidly. The regulatory and market environment in which these resources operate is also changing, with the growth in wind and solar energy necessitating additional requirements for grid support services and a broader array of participants engaging in regional electricity markets. Effective integration of distributed resources (behind the meter supply and storage), weather dependent renewables, and mobile electric energy supply and storage through electrified transportation requires evolution in planning, operational and control strategies, as well as an appreciation of how people will adopt and use distributed and mobile resources. This minitrack invites papers that address modeling, simulation and hardware developments; economic and system analyses; and studies of individual and organizational (including governments) behavior and decision making as pertaining to distributed, renewable and mobile resources in electric power systems.

 Session 1:  Grid-Scale Integration
Session Organizer and Chair – Anna Stuhlmacher, Charlie Smith

Electricity market restructuring, advances in energy generation technology and agreements on the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions have paved the way for a significant 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, need to be considered.

This session invites technical papers addressing new approaches, models, and methods for the planning, designing, and operating of power systems with large or increasing shares of VG, including the impact of distributed energy resources on bulk system reliability. We particularly encourage papers that focus on the key issues of managing increased levels of variability and uncertainty on the transmission system with new approaches to increasing co-ordination, system flexibility, the value and role of new grid support services, 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 and ancillary service markets.  New approaches to the evolution of the wind and photovoltaic plant design to enable this participation, including wind/PV/battery hybrids and grid-forming inverters, are necessary. This session will address some of the challenges and approaches to achieve these goals.

Session 2: Grid-Edge: Coordination, Communication, and Consumers
Session Organizers and Chairs: Mostafa Farrokhabadi, Ward Jewell

Distributed energy resources (DERs) refers to a range of resources at the medium/low voltage layers of the grid, including generation, energy storage (including mobile storage through electrified transportation), flexible loads, and advanced sensing devices. These may coordinate and act as single controllable entities, referred to as microgrids. DERs can play an important 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 coordinated control, optimization, modeling, and technology to enable participation in regulation and balancing services, ancillary service markets, distribution system management, and transactive markets. Moreover, growth in mobile and stationary DERs vastly increases the number of independent decision-makers providing services to the grid. How these customer-suppliers will interact with DERs and the larger power grid is evolving rapidly.

This session invites technical papers presenting new approaches, models and methods for planning, operating, and architecture of, interconnected transmission and/or distribution systems with significant DER penetration. This session also invites papers that use methods from social science, public policy, economics, or data analytics to explore the interactions between DER owners at the individual or community scale, the technologies they control, and the power distribution and transmission system.

Minitrack Chairs:

Seth Blumsack (Primary Contact)
Pennsylvania State University
sethb@psu.edu

Judy Cardell
Smith College
jcardell@smith.edu

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 dynamics and control for power systems and on distributed decision and control concepts for generation, storage, and loads are specifically sought for this year’s program.

Session 1:  Large Scale Dynamics and Control
Session Organizers and Chairs – Brian Pierre, Urmila Agrawal

The 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 those found in inverter-based resources (IBRs) and 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 the interconnected power system through synchronized wide-area measurements provided by Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). Recent events related to unplanned tripping of IBRs under transient conditions are pointing to the need for synchronized high-speed point-on-wave measurements and analysis. 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 and resiliency of electric power grids. This session will showcase recent developments in the area of large-scale dynamic research in the power system area.

Session 2:  Distributed Decision and Control
Session Organizers and Chairs: Daniel Molzahn, Sam Chevalier

The second session addresses distributed control concepts that can be integrated into a more decentralized command and control of existing critical energy infrastructures.  The world 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, protect, and integrate distributed resources with growing dispersed intelligence and diverging objectives. Moreover, these new control techniques must be secure against cyberattacks, including attacks where some of the distributed resources maliciously deviate from the proscribed control protocol or misreport measurements and calculations.

Papers in this session present new control theory, tools and testbeds that support the development of a sound scientific basis for controlling energy infrastructure using diverse resources including distributed generation and loads. They address the fundamental obstacles to generalizable methodologies for controlling complex engineered systems while economically and reliably achieving evolving local and global performance objectives. The session welcomes emerging data-driven methods for enhancing distributed control and optimization techniques, and methods for improving resilience of control and protection systems especially under decentralized inverter-based systems.

Minitrack Chairs:

Jim Follum (Primary Contact)
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
james.follum@pnnl.gov

Mani Venkatasubramanian
Washington State University
mani@wsu.edu

Public concerns about the adverse environmental and health effects of using fossil fuels 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 penetration of renewable resources, energy storage, and smart grid technologies that facilitate demand response and greater grid observability. As a result, the electric power industry faces new challenges in the planning and operating the power system that require new market mechanisms, computational optimization tools, and innovative risk management strategies and tools to achieve productive and allocative efficiencies. A key concept in addressing the uncertainty and variability associated with renewables integration and in mobilization of a diverse resource portfolio is integration, control and coordination of new sources of flexibility in the markets. Hence, a central theme of this mini track revolves around identifying metrics and the needs for the evaluation of risk and the provision of flexibility. A second theme emphasizes the characterization of market products and public policies that incentivizes optimization and diversification of flexibile resources to assure system reliability in the face of uncertainty, at least cost. Additionally, we are interested in novel works focusing on coordination of electricity system with other critical infrastructure systems such as natural gas supply. The first session focuses on market design and analysis while the second focuses on computational aspects of optimizing and coordination of the planning, operation and procurement of a diverse distributed flexibility portfolio, and on the management of risk and uncertainty as well as the coordination of energy related infrastructures.

Session 1:  Market Design and Implementation
Session Organizers and Session Chairs: Richard D. Tabors, Ramteen Sioshansi 

The electric power industry is undergoing significant changes driven primarily by the changing generation portfolio (decarbonization) that is moving generation away from fossil technologies toward increased reliance on intermittent, zero marginal cost renewable technologies. Decarbonization combined with extreme weather events are moving the industry toward greater awareness of the need for more resilience in both physical and economic / market response. Decentralization of both generation and control is being driven by increases in Distributed Energy Resources (DER).  These forces are challenging the utility operations, economics and management as system operators work to respond while maintaining reliability and economic viability. System operators are being expected to maintain the reliability of delivered energy with fewer firm resources, more intermittent resources and far greater uncertainty in net demand at the interfaces between the wholesale and retail segments of the system.

This session aims to bring together leading researchers for comprehensive discussions of the metrics and market structures that will be capable of adapting to the rapidly changing demands of electric energy systems. It will be necessary to adapt for change at multiple time scales from the supply side (both traditional and renewable technologies) as well as from the demand side with ever increasing penetration of DERs, energy storage and responsive demand. Papers that discuss innovative assessment and adaptation to a changing environment from both theoretical and empirical perspectives are encouraged.

Session 2:  Flexibility, Coordination, and Control
Session Organizers and Session Chairs: Johanna Mathieu, Kevin Kircher

Power systems need new forms of flexibility and new methods of coordination and control to integrate high volumes of renewable resources, cope with electrification of vehicles and buildings, and enable other decarbonization strategies while maintaining or improving grid reliability and resilience. The objective of this session is to bring together papers focused on new problem formulations, algorithmic developments, and computational advances that directly address these needs. Papers focusing on harnessing new sources of flexibility, coordinating grid resources, coordinating systems (e.g., ISO-DSO coordination, coordinating power grids/markets with other infrastructures such as natural gas networks), or optimizing operations under uncertainty (e.g., stochastic and chance-constrained power flow optimization, stochastic and robust unit commitment, risk-based approaches) are particularly encouraged.

Minitrack Chairs:

Shmuel S. Oren (Primary Contact)
University of California at Berkeley
oren@ieor.berkeley.edu

Masood Parvania
University of Utah
masood.parvania@utah.edu

This minitrack focuses on measuring and enhancing the network resilience of future electric power infrastructure. The integration and adoption of advanced technologies in future energy systems requires sophisticated methods for understanding their integration into increasingly complex and dynamic infrastructure without compromising functional properties of the network. We invite papers that examine issues of modeling, assessment, and improvement for power system network resilience, including aspects of reliability, security, robustness, and survivability of interconnected power systems. Papers are also encouraged involving testbeds that demonstrate the robustness of advanced technologies and the associated computational and communication challenges associated with operating the power system.

Session 1:  Grid Reinforcement, Testbeds and Synthetic Networks
Session Organizers and Co-Chairs:  Mladen Kezunovic, Mert Korkali

The combined cascading failure of electricity and other infrastructure networks greatly increases the discomfort, safety, and economic loss to society. There are considerable challenges in modeling and coordinating important interactions (possibly including human, market, or economic factors) and quantifying the adverse interactions so that their risk can be estimated, mitigated and controlled. It is also important to verify and quantify these interactions in large-scale testbeds. An essential part of testbed design is the creation of synthetic networks of various infrastructures that allow the scale and complexity to be faithfully represented, allowing evaluation of novel robust solutions. Methods for reinforcing networks through hardening the physical components or offering distributed energy resources (DER) as network support are of interest as well.

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. Novel test approaches that are enabling physical and virtual testing of the interactions, as well as large scale synthetic networks that are creating realistic test environments are needed. Papers describing new approaches to modeling and testing complex infrastructure failures in the context of complex systems, complex networks, and probabilistic analyses of cascades among interacting networks are encouraged. Papers using testbeds should state the hypotheses being tested and discuss the conclusions about the hypotheses’ validation. Joint papers from multiple organizations that have federated testbed facilities or are working on the development of synthetic networks are welcome.

Session 2:  Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Session Organizers and Co-Chairs: Le Xie, Xiao Chen

The electric power system is a safety-critical infrastructure system. Operators now have an unprecedented wealth of data from a variety of sources, including demand response participants, synchrophasors, and enhanced SCADA systems. If managed properly, this data can provide opportunities to increase the efficiency, reliability, and overall performance of the power system. With the increased adoption of grid modernization, demand response programs, and distributed generation that is often renewable, intermittent, and stochastic, system operators need to manage vast amounts of data in the presence of data inaccuracy and system uncertainties. This introduces new opportunities for various artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies including probabilistic AI/ML.

This session invites technical papers presenting new approaches, methods, and applications related to data analytics, including AI/ML that advances the state of the art for safety-critical applications in planning, designing, operating and protecting electric power systems. This session will address challenges and opportunities associated with big data coming from a variety of sources such as behavioral data in demand response, synchrophasors, weather, and enhanced control and other data acquisition systems.

Minitrack Chairs:

Kate Davis (Primary Contact)
Texas A&M University
katedavis@tamu.edu

David Newman
University of Alaska-Fairbanks
denewman@alaska.edu