Smart distributed control of power systems

The electric power network provides the flexible energy delivery mechanism that interconnects almost an infinite variety of sources and loads with a high level of reliability. However, the existing energy delivery infrastructure, designed over 50-60 years ago, is aging, inflexible, dumb and under-utilized, and will potentially limit societypsilas ability to achieve its long-term energy objectives. Given that transmission investment has considerably lagged generation and load growth for the last two decades, it is easy to see that a crisis is brewing. As our energy infrastructure moves towards long-term sustainability, our aging under-invested grid will become the limiting factor and will need to be completely transformed. Integration of power electronics and communications in a massively distributed manner, into virtually every element of the power system infrastructure to create a dasiaSmart Gridpsila, offers unique possibilities for improving the reliability, asset utilization and power quality. This talk will discuss some of the opportunities that are available for technology to be deployed to build a more reliable and asset efficient infrastructure.