Fostering intuitive minds for power system design

One of the most challenging aspects of engineering education is to give students an intuitive feel for the systems they are studying. Historically, engineering schools have excelled at providing their undergraduate students with a strong background in the basic sciences and the theoretical fundamentals of engineering. Such a background has been, and continues to be, crucial. But while paper and pencil exercises can be quite useful for highlighting these fundamentals, they often fall short in imparting the desired intuitive system insight. Yet such insight can be crucial, particularly as a new engineer moves from straightforward analysis into the domain of design. To help, this article provides a case study example of how a design project can be used to provide such intuitive insight into both basic power system operation involving power flow and contingency analysis as well as more advanced topics involving an hourly locational marginal price (LMP) power market. This design project is based upon one developed by the author that is included in the Power System Analysis and Design textbook (third edition), and it is solved using the PowerWorld Simulator software.