S. Massoud Amin

Toward a smart grid: power delivery for the 21st century

In this article, we present the security, agility, and robustness/survivability of a large-scale power delivery infrastructure that faces new threats and unanticipated conditions. By way of background, we present a brief overview of the past work on the challenges faced in online parameter estimation and real-time adaptive control of a damaged F-15 aircraft. This work, in part, provided the inspiration and laid the foundation in the 1990s for the flight testing of a fast parameter estimation/modeling and reconfigurable aircraft control system that allowed the F-15 to become self-healing in the face of damaged equipment.

Smart Grid: Overview, Issues and Opportunities. Advances and Challenges in Sensing, Modeling, Simulation, Optimization and Control

The genesis of early power systems and electric power grids during the past 130 years was enabled by automation and control of electromechanical machinery and power delivery networks. Todays end-to-end power and energy systems (from fuel source to end use) fundamentally depend on embedded and often an overlaid systems of sensors, computation, communication, control and optimization. There are even more opportunities and challenges in todays devices and systems, as well as in the emerging modern power systems – ranging from dollars, watts, emissions, standards, and more – at nearly every scale of sensing and control. Recent policies combined with potential for technological innovations and business opportunities, have attracted a high level of interest in smart grids. The potential for a highly distributed system with a high penetration of intermittent sources poses opportunities and challenges. Any complex dynamic infrastructure network typically has many layers, decision-making units and is vulnerable to various types of disturbances. Effective, intelligent, distributed control is required that would enable parts of the networks to remain operational and even automatically reconfigure in the event of local failures or threats of failure. This presentation provides an overview of smart grids and recent advances in distributed sensing, modeling, and control, particularly at both the high-voltage power grid and at consumer level. Such advances may contribute toward the development of an effective, intelligent, distributed control of power system networks with a focus on addressing distributed sensing, computation, estimation, controls and dynamical systems challenges and opportunities ahead.

Optimal mix and placement of energy storage systems in power distribution networks for reduced outage costs

As energy infrastructure is upgraded to meet modern digital societys need for secure and high-quality electric power, grid-tied energy storage systems are becoming a viable means for improving system reliability and realizing the benefits of Smart Grid. This paper investigates the optimal implementation of distributed storage resources in a power distribution system or islanded microgrid in conjunction with an intelligent load shedding scheme to minimize the societal costs of blackouts. First, a non-linear combinatorial optimization problem for prioritizing outage ride-through service is formulated and a solution methodology is proposed that combines a local search heuristic with simulated annealing. Next, a resource allocation optimization problem is developed to determine the optimal mix and placement of energy storage resources in a power distribution network for intentional islanding of sectionalizable sub-networks. Simulations are performed on the IEEE 123 node test feeder model subject to realistic power system constraints.

Toward Agile and Resilient Large-Scale Systems: Adaptive Robust National/International Infrastructures

How to manage or control a heterogeneous, widely dispersed, yet globally interconnected system is a serious technological problem in any case. It is even more complex and difficult to control it for optimal efficiency and maximum benefit to the ultimate consumers while still allowing all its business components to compete fairly and freely.This paper briefly describes our on-going work in our holistic approach to analysis of the national and global infrastructure development that builds on advances in the mathematics of complexity, methods of probabilistic risk assessment and techniques for fast computation and interactive simulation with the goal of increased agility and resilience for large-scale systems.As an example, a model and simulation of the “Electric Enterprise” (taken in the broadest possible sense and connected to telecom, water, oil/gas and financial networks) have been developed. The model uses autonomous, adaptive agents to represent both the possible industrial components, and the corporate entities that own these components. Objectives are: 1) To develop a high-fidelity scenario-free modelling and optimization tool to use for gaining strategic insight into the operation of the deregulated power industry; 2) to show how networks of communicating and cooperating intelligent software agents can be used to adaptively manage complex distributed systems; 3) to investigate how collections of agents (agencies) can be used to buy and sell electricity and participate in the electronic marketplace; and ultimately to create self-optimizing and self-healing capabilities for the electric power grid and the interconnected critical infrastructures.From a broader view, we have integrated these into a composite analysis technique, these advances raise an unprecedented new possibility for projecting the future implications—social, economic, environmental, human health, political, and technical—of major societal development activities and technology programs for nations individually and the world as a whole. Taken together, they promise both a real-time outlook and a future perspective on the spectrum of outcomes that might result from alternative national decision pathways. Such projection capability could reveal the development options, results, and implications for any strategy for any type of nation, whether primitive, underdeveloped, developing, or industrial. Forcing functions, critical junctures, and pinch points could be identified so that scarce development resources can be allocated to maximize benefit and minimize unintended consequences. The full realization of this next step in analysis of technology will require several years of dedicated international effort, but the need is urgent and the potential payoff great. The technical—and organizational—underpinnings for such a holistic analysis approach have been demonstrated. It remains for us to build from them a global tool for a better future.

Electricity infrastructure security: Toward reliable, resilient and secure cyber-physical power and energy systems

Electricity infrastructure touches us all — the key challenge, pertinent to this panel session, is to enable secure and very high-confidence sensing, communication and control of a heterogeneous, widely dispersed, yet globally interconnected system, which is a serious technological problem in any case. It is even more complex and difficult to control it for optimal efficiency and maximum benefit to the ultimate consumers while still allowing all its business components to compete fairly and freely. The North American power network may be considered to be the largest and most complex machine in the world — its transmission lines connect all the electric generation and distribution on the continent. In that respect, it exemplifies many of the complexities of electric power infrastructure and how technological innovation combined with efficient markets and enabling policies can address them. This network represents an enormous investment, including over 15,000 generators in 10,000 power plants, and hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines and distribution networks. With diminished transmission and generation capacities, and with dramatic increases in inter-regional bulk power transfers and diversity of transactions, the electric power grid is being used in ways for which it was not originally designed. Grid congestion and atypical power flows have been increasing during the last twenty five years, while customer expectations of reliability and cyber-physical security are rising to meet the needs of a pervasively digital world.

Toward more secure, stronger and smarter electric power grids

Grid communications and control systems are often thought to be much more securely protected than is actually the case. An effective remedial program begins with a thorough and clear-eyed assessment of all vulnerabilities; especially to malware and intrusions. Both the importance and difficulty of protecting power systems have long been recognized. The critical assets that must be accounted for include thousands of transformers, line reactors, series capacitors, and transmission lines. Physical protection of these widely diverse and dispersed assets is impractical and command control layers yield new benefits only if designed correctly and securely, posing additional challenges. Our strategic focus is to better understand the true dynamics of complex interdependent energy/communications/economic networks in order to enable stronger, greener, more secure and smarter power grids. The objective of this project is to model, design and develop a reconfigurable smart end-to-end system supported by secure sensing/wireless communication network and fault-resilient real-time controls.

Optimal Capacity Partitioning of Multi-Use Customer-Premise Energy Storage Systems

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are becoming a viable means for large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers to realize reliability improvements and service charge reductions. This paper investigates the operation and planning of customer-side-of-the-meter BESS that are simultaneously used for both purposes. For scheduling applications, a new multi-objective economic dispatch algorithm that accounts for battery cycling constraints is proposed for customers with net metering and a Time of Use (TOU) rate structure. For reliability applications, service point outage probability and outage cost models are presented to determine the economic value of standby energy capacity. Simulations are performed on a test C&I system with local generation resources using seven candidate storage systems. Service charge and outage savings solutions are combined to determine pareto-efficient partitioning of BESS energy capacity and assess the economic competitiveness of various storage technologies.

A control and communications architecture for a secure and reconfigurable power distribution system: An analysis and case study

Abstract The transformation of the end-to-end power grid to a digitalized, intelligent, self-healing system presents many new modeling, sensing, communications, and control challenges that must be addressed before extensive deployment can begin. Increasing the security, robustness, and efficiency of electric power infrastructure requires utilizing these automation technologies in order to continually assess and optimize system performance. In this paper, an intelligent distributed secure control architecture is presented for distribution systems to provide greater adaptive protection, with the ability to proactively reconfigure, and rapidly respond to disturbances. Detailed descriptions of functionalities at each layer of the architecture as well as the whole system are provided. Applying this comprehensive systems’ approach, performance results for the IEEE 123 node test feeder are simulated and analyzed. The results show the trade-offs between system reliability, operational constraints, and costs involved. This work represents a novel strategy toward developing an analytical and multi-domain methodology to assess the effects of smart grid technologies on distribution system operations and performance.

Smart Grid As a Dynamical System of Complex Networks: A Framework for Enhanced Security

Abstract From a strategic R&D viewpoint, a major challenge is posed by the lack of a unified mathematical framework with robust tools for modeling, simulation, control, and optimization of time-critical operations in smart electric power grids (spanning from fuel sources to end-use) as complex multi-component and multi-scaled networks. During the past four decades, much effort has been committed to better understanding the dynamics of large-scale power systems in order to enhance security, quality, reliability, and availability (SQRA) of the overall system. Specific attributes of SQRA are needed for electricity to meet the needs of the evolving digital society. This paper aims directly at the issue of metrics to determine security performance. It defines a framework for developing needed indices and standards for benchmarking security, quality, reliability, and availability in the future.