Information, reliability, and control in the new power system

Deregulation of North American markets in electrical power promises serious new challenges to automatic control and to the information infrastructure in which automatic control is embedded. What kind of control is viable under deregulation? The economic consequences of controller performance promise to be very high. Will infrastructure costs and liability issues discourage use of wide area controls? Can controller performance be assured to the extent that controller services can be marketed in the same sense as other commodities? In the quest for power system reliability, what new balance is evolving between automatic control and less technical methods? The intent of this paper is to further the dialog between the power system and the automatic control communities on such issues. Examples taken from the Western System breakups of 1996 argue that full use of automatic control as a means for power system reinforcement is strongly contingent upon new infrastructure for planning and operation