Case Western Reserve University - Great Lakes Energy Institute - Grid: Power Management & Electronics

http://energy.case.edu/management_control.shtml

Cleveland, OH
Kenneth Loparo
Professor of Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
kenneth.loparo@case.edu
(216)-368-4115

Michael Branicky
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
michael.branicky@case.edu
(216)-368-6430

The effective and efficient delivery of electrical energy requires a large-scale interconnected system that includes equipment and services that support the generation, transmission, and distribution subsystems. Although conventional systems are highly distributed and involve temporal dynamics on multiple and diverse time scales, the delicate balance of supply and demand is impressively maintained by a coordinated control, planning and management system that has a large number of resources at its disposal. In order to meet the ever increasing need for electrical energy at competitive pricing and with reduced green house gas emissions, it is necessary to move away from conventional power system architectures and operating policies and move toward more autonomous systems that involve highly distributed generation and storage systems and an information backbone that facilities the exchange of critical data on a timely basis to maintain stability and security of the system and provide users with the data that is needed to support demand side management strategies.

New power system concepts such as "smart grid" and "micro grid" are flooding the popular and technical press, and are elements of a more comprehensive "smart energy" system that defines a new information-rich power system architecture where dynamic clusters of users and independent power producers are organized into small-scale reconfigurable power grids that can operate autonomously to generate and distribute power to the local group and can effortlessly interface to the grip to provide excess power. The stable and secure operation of a power system requires the balance of real power (supply=demand) as well as the control of reactive power. As we move to more diverse (e.g. wind, solar, fuel cells, biomass etc.) and spatially distributed generating sources on the grid, the need for a systems approach in both design, real-time operation, and planning over periods of hours, days and weeks is paramount. Because of the move away from conventional generation (synchronous generators where energy is stored in rotating inertia) to more dynamic generation with highly stochastic availability, there is need for the development on new sensor systems, communication architectures and distributed control and decision-making systems that can effectively control, manage and coordinate the overall operations of the grid.

Retrieved from Case Western Reserve University website on 12/31/2009.