PSERC Webinar - The Key Role of Network Systems Engineering in Meeting the Energy and Environment Dream

Marija Ilic
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University

A PSERC Public Webinar

Energy and the environment are once again on everyone’s mind. The primary energy producers have entered a race for making the traditional energy resources cleaner and safer, as well as for developing scientific principles in support of entirely novel energy resources. At the same time, we do not have the infrastructure to transport the energy effectively. The infrastructure for converting our primary energy resources and delivering energy in the form required by the end users was designed with qualitatively different objectives from the functions of today; it is aging and far from what it should and could become.

This talk concerns the basic challenge of transforming today’s passive electric power grids into active enablers of efficient and reliable utilisation of emerging unconventional energy resources. Our conservative estimate for the electric energy system alone is that a 25% increase in efficiency can be obtained today by such transformation without degrading reliability of services. However, while much of the hardware exists, meeting this goal still poses a fundamental challenge to the current state-of-the-art systems and network sciences. Any large-scale penetration of ntermittent resources is practically impossible without equally large-scale sensing, actuation and on-line data-assisted decision making by various industry participants, ranging from Independent System Operators (ISOs), Load Service Entities (LSEs), power producers/aggregators, to end users. In short, these resources cannot succeed without significant improvements to the control of the infrastructure.

We pose the problem of future electric energy systems as the problem of network design, monitoring, and control for enabling implementation of multiple objectives by the actors embedded at various network layers. Typical tradeoffs of interest are efficiency, cost, emissions, network congestion, profits, differentiated reliability, long-term sustainable services, etc. We present our new cyber-physical modeling framework as a possible way to represent future electric energy systems. The emphasis is on model structure needed for effective deployment of distributed sensing and decision tools. Finally, we describe the fundamental role of fast-switched electric network control for shaping effective system energy dynamics. We argue that while on the average no real work is done, very fast distributed switching of stored energy in wires (inductors and capacitors) enables stable delivery of energy which would otherwise be impossible. Such active wire control may become key to balancing highly stochastic supply according to desired quality of service.