Innovation and trends for future electric power systems

The electric power industry is experiencing a period of sustained growth to meet the growing energy needs of the planet. Innovations such as deployment of smart grid solutions will facilitate the pending growth of the infrastructure as new facilities are added to the network and embedded with the installed base. Grid intelligence will assist planners and operators deal with the increasing complexity of secure and reliable power supply and delivery. Renewable power generation technologies will expand in both the total GW to be installed and percentage of contribution to the total energy consumed, but renewables alone will not displace the need for new base load generation. Cleaner and lower emission fossil generation sources will continue to be the backbone of power generation additions. Nuclear power will grow in importance as the industry looks towards the future, but siting and permitting these plants will create formidable challenges in the industrialized countries. Conservation and efficiency improvements will contribute to demand reduction and parenthetically reduce the need for new generation additions. While not specifically mentioned in this article, innovations and technology developments to increase continuous current ratings and fault interrupting capabilities for high voltage equipment will continue as urban centers grow and expand. Compact designs with reduced footprints are necessary to install new substations in densely populated urban areas with very high load densities. UHV ac and dc will become increasingly important as transmission distances increase between power supply resources and urban load centers. Distribution automation, not discussed in this article, will help to optimize the reliability and performance of distribution systems. Major investments in new distribution automation and distribution management systems will occur in the not too distant future as the industry seeks to capitalize on the deployment of AMI systems. Looking forward, w- e face exciting and challenging times in our industry. There has never been a better time to be a power systems engineer leading this industry transformation.