Report from IEEE-PES 2010 General Meeting and Conference

Further Reading

• Selected slides from plenary session (468)
• IEEE-PES 2010 General Meeting plenary session video (304)

IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and PES - Power and Energy Society

IEEE is the largest non-profit technical association with nearly 400,000 members in almost 200 countries.

IEEE has about 30% share in world’s technical literature on electrical engineering.

PES, Power and Energy Society is the third largest society in IEEE (39 of them all together) with the largest number of developed and under-development standards of about 400.

IEEE has great ambitions and enlargement plans. To save strength and integrity, it is fairly business-oriented. The rules for the literature market, conferences and member fees are commercial but prove to be effective.

IEEE is, as many other similar organisations, driven by Smart Grid concept now.

http://smartgrid.ieee.org

There are two technical initiatives:

• Electric vehicle initiative
• Cloud computing: to collect all information in cloud -web by maximization of capability of server farms

Plenary session

Ken Rose, independent consultant and senior fellow from the Institute of Public Utilities at University of Michigan presented his view point on energy role in today’s economy.  Energy is vital factor, but like any other resource, it also has its limits.

Energy efficiency is not another popular topic, but a must. However, it may follow a risk referred to as Jevon's Paradox. In short, the paradox says that energy efficiency leads to an ultimate drop in energy prices.  In eras of economy growth, this positive feedback mechanism very much helped economy expansion and creation of new economy opportunities. Nowadays, with climate change concerns, Jevon's Paradox is seen as negative feedback mechanism, which creates unintended consequences - though with the best intentions - for energy conservation.  In other words, technology improvements, particularly those in energy efficiency, will not do the job of energy conservation and emissions mitigation.  As technology will not do this job alone, quantification of energy sustainability targets is necessary.

The conference 25-29 August 2010

It was huge, with almost 50 different sessions and committees meeting, nine tutorials and about 1,000 technical papers.

The conference was dominated by the subject of smart grids.

Smart Grid topics have existed for nearly 50 years.  Many different aspects have been already selected and exploited.  Today, the most highlighted attributes of a smart grid are:

• Smart metering, which shall motivate energy conservation and efficiency behaviour.  For this moment, it is being exploited as a transaction facility.  Load shading combined with integration of as many different generation types as possible offers an important technical edge, but it requires a market mechanism and it can clearly be seen that large efforts are going to facilitate the power transactions interface.
• Communication. Data collection, analysis and automation algorithms and hardware for power services.  There is common believe in need of multiplying number of data to let all the different components of smart grid to communicate.  Already a lot of data is stored but not used.  A utility person at the conference said that they have data for the optimisation of transformer operation and are planning to do it but he did not say when!  Does really T&D requires that large automation or does this automation require so much data.  Are so many interoperability levels required?  Do most consumers want become prosumers?  The risk of information overflow is high.  It is also a threat to cybersecurity.
• Integration of different types of power technologies:

• Renewables, mainly wind and PV
• Storage
• Plug in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV)

 

 A lot has been presented and discussed during the conference. The new and really challenging is PHEV. New battery technologies are arising, chargers and consequences for grid stability are simulated and modelled.

As for storage already almost 100 GWs global capacity is available but this figure is expected to rise very quickly. It is suggested that the capacity of storage, particularly at high regulating rate of MW/s, should be at the level of 15-20% of renewables capacity, but in some countries is expected at even 60% (Japan). Unfortunately, in many cases, the reason to install an NaS battery or flywheel is to defer transformer replacement!

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