Ralph Masiello

Sharing the Ride of Power: Understanding Transactive Energy in the Ecosystem of Energy Economics

Advocates of Transactive Energy (TE) make arguments for the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) into a market environment from the standpoint of overall energy economics, customer choice, facilitating technology adoption, and encouraging innovation. At a very high level, this is reasonable given the rapid development and adoption of personalized transactions via the web and mobile computing in many domains and the equally rapid proliferation of DERs, at least in some geographic areas.

Microgrids: There May Be One in Your Future [Guest Editorial]

The articles in this special section focus on the development, applications, and technologies that support microgrids.

Demand Response the other side of the curve [Guest Editorial]

FOR DECADES, ELECTRIC POWER planning and operations dealt with an inelastic demand curve; the classic demand-supply equation had a vertical line on the demand side. In the past decade this has begun to change as various mechanisms have developed to enable consumers, first large ones but increasingly smaller commercial and now residential, to respond to market mechanisms and reduce their consumption at peak hours, reduce spot peak prices, relieve congestion, and supply reserves during reliability events.

Exploring Risk-Based Approaches for ISO/RTO Asset Managers

In competitive power markets, the independent system operator (ISO/RTO) manages assets and obligations on behalf of owners to meet ISO/RTO goals of reliability, equal access, and market efficiency. Merchant generators make unit commitment decisions, transmission operators receive a regulated payment for transmission assets operated by the ISO/RTO asset manager. Load is scheduled with the ISO/RTO as either price responsive or price taking. As asset managers, the ISO/RTO can benefit from a menu of approaches introduced to identify, measure and manage risks in power systems under uncertain economic conditions. Since competitive markets have introduced new roles for existing participants and new participants to the industry, appetite for these new tools has never been higher. However, applying these new tools has not been without difficulty. In this paper, the authors illustrate three issues facing the ISO/RTO asset manager: 1) planning for reserves in the face of uncertainty; 2) line maintenance which minimizes market disruption; and 3) measuring tradeoffs between investments in reliability and market efficiency. The authors use several approaches and highlight areas for new research using real options,portfolio optimization, and efficiency/reliability tradeoffs in the context of a simple two-bus example. Areas which require more work include the integration of nonpower risks to unit commitment models, applying real options to load variations, using options premiums to compensate out of merit units, using real options to measure transmission decisions, and performance metrics for monitoring dollars spent on reliability and efficiency tradeoffs.

Modernizing the Grid: Challenges and Opportunities for a Sustainable Future

In Addition To Their Age, Particularly in large metropolitan areas, electric power systems throughout the industrialized world face challenges brought on by new technology trends, environmental concerns, evolving weather patterns, a multiplicity of consumer needs, and regulatory requirements. New technology trends include the development of more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective renewable generation and distributed energy resources (DERs), energy storage technologies, and electric vehicles (EVs), along with monitoring, protection, automation, and control devices and communications that offer significant opportunities for realizing a sustainable energy future. The medium- to long-term vision for the electrical grid is to transition away from carbon-based fuels toward increased penetration of renewable DERs and use of energy storage and electric transportation.

The Utility and Grid of the Future: Challenges, Needs, and Trends

The electric utility industry is evolving at a pace that is reminiscent of the transformations that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. This evolution is driven by various factors, mainly by the emergence of distributed energy resources (DER s) to satisfy societal concerns regarding the utilization of renewable energies and reduction of greenhouse emissions as well as the introduction of a plethora of new communications, control, automation and power electronics technologies and solutions. The latter have emerged as a consequence of the unprecedented growth of computing power and are enabling the long pursued objective of end-to-end real-time system awareness and operation, covering generation, transmission, and distribution systems as well as the grid edge.

Using battery energy storage to reduce renewable resource curtailment

This paper presents the results of a study done to determine the potential for energy storage systems to increase the output of renewable power generation and improve the performance of the power grid in northern Vermont. At present, a large amount of renewable energy generation, both wind and solar, is connected to the power transmission system in northern Vermont. At times and under certain conditions, limitations of capacity or operation of the transmission system in New England force curtailment in the operation of that renewable generation, so it produces less power than it could. Electrical energy storage can potentially improve this situation by allowing the renewable energy to be stored rather than curtailed, and then used at later times, when needed and when transmission constraints do not limit its use. The study looked at whether, and how, energy storage units of the appropriate type and size, installed at the right locations in the northern Vermont power grid, could both improve the situation and payback their cost.

Bottling electricity [Guest Editorial]

This set of four articles offers both an overview as well as some detailed examples of what is going on in energy storage today.

Microgrid Control Systems: A Practical Framework [In My View]

The growing interest in microgrids has brought a great level of focus, creativity, and investment in the development and commercialization of microgrid control systems. The primary value propositions for microgrids are improving reliability and resiliency, enabling renewable generation integration at a higher penetration level than normal, enhancing efficiency, and the economic dispatch of distributed generation to reduce operation and maintenance costs and create new revenue streams (for instance, through participation in the energy or ancillary service markets). All of these efforts emphasize the need for a microgrid control system that can operate the system autonomously in a coordinated fashion to achieve predefined performance goals.

Learn from the Past: It's Better Than Repeating It [In My View]

The articles in this issue of the publication present a contrast in the outlook for the grid of the future. On one hand, serious efforts are underway to define the distribution system operator (DSO ) and plan the transition from todays distribution utility to tomorrows distribution market operator. On the other hand, a grim assessment of the cyber insecurity of the grid operating-system infrastructure is, if anything, understating the risks and challenges in addressing them.