Teaching smart grids: Yet another challenge and opportunity for transforming power systems curriculum

The combined industry changes, technological and organizational, have brought about new complexity from the highest level system to the smallest level component. The consequent burden on new technical leaders is enormous. Most of all, they must be capable of rethinking how to plan, rebuild and operate an infrastructure which has been turned upside-down from what it used to be. In order to prepare for such major challenge, leaders must understand 3-φ physics (the basic foundations); modeling of complex systems (architecture-dependent models, components and their interactions, performance objectives); dependence of models on sensors and actuators; design for desired system performance (defined by economic policy and engineering specifications); numerical methods and algorithms, and IT, in its broadest sense.