While electric interconnections have had different kinds and levels of intelligence in them for many decades, in the last 6 years the notion of the “smart grid” has come seemingly out of nowhere to be on the minds of not just power engineers but policy makers, regulators, rate commissions, and the general public. Inherent in the notion of the smart grid is the ability to communicate much more sensor data and have far more computations at many more locations using these data.
The purpose of this book is to give power engineers, information technology workers in the electric sector, and others a snapshot of the state of the art and practice today as well as a peek into the future regarding the smart grid. There is a special focus on new kinds of communications and computations enabled or necessitated by the smart grid.
This book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with cloud computing, whose use is being seriously considered for planning and operational use in a number of utilities and independent system operators/regional transmission organizations as of March 2014. Cloud computing has the potential to deploy massive amounts of computational resources to help grid operations, especially under contingency situations. Chapter 1 describes the mission-critical features that cloud computing infrastructures must support in order to be appropriate for operational use in power grids. It also describes the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy GridCloud project to develop such technologies. Chapter 2 describes a handful of “killer apps” for cloud computing in power grid operations. It has been written by leading power researchers.
Part II deals with wide-area communications for power grids. Chapter 3 describes a wide range of power application programs that have extreme communications requirements over wide distances. Such applications are becoming more widely deployed as grids come under more pressure with every passing year. Chapter 4 describes GridStat, a middleware communications framework designed from the ground up to meet these challenging requirements. The chapter includes a detailed analysis of how different technologies used in today’s grids such as multiprotocol label switching, Internet protocol multicast, IEC 61850, and others are inadequate for the applications described in Chapter 3 and the requirements derived from them in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 presents an advanced framework based on the service-oriented architecture approach for integrated modeling, monitoring, and control. Chapter 6 analyzes the role of power line communication, which is also called broadband over power lines, in the smart grid. Power line communication/broadband over power lines technologies can provide additional redundant paths for data delivery in a grid, and ones that have failure characteristics other than traditional network communications infrastructures. Finally, Chapter 7 describes a novel approach for estimating the statistical properties of power grids. This is an important first step toward having more broadly reusable power algorithms with greater confidence, as computer scientists and mathematicians have done for centuries.
Part III deals with open source, something common in other industries that is starting to draw great interest from utilities and has great potential to help stimulate innovation in power grids (which suffer from a far higher degree of “vendor lock-in” than most other industries). Chapter 8 explains what open source software is and its history. It then overviews a number of freely available open source power application programs.
Part IV deals with the broad category of automation. Chapter 9 explains how microgrids fit into the smart grid landscape and how they can contribute to its operations. Chapter 10 describes in detail the design and operation of microgrids. Chapter 11 introduces a virtual energy provisioning concept by which utilities can collect and aggregate advanced demand information in order to better manage smart grid supply chains. Chapter 12 describes a new technique for better managing photovoltaic energy while limiting harmonic pollution. Chapter 13 provides an approach for two-way interactions between simulations and an operational wide-area measurement system that is both self-tuning and self-diagnosing. Chapter 14 describes an approach for load management in smart grids that is stable, distributed and employs multiagent techniques. Chapter 15 details the use of an expert system application to enable electric distribution systems to be reconfigured in new and advantageous way. Chapter 16 describes an approach for both cleansing the load curve data and calculating bus load coincidence factors in order to better exploit smart meter data. Chapter 17 overviews an advanced metering infrastructure system and its components, discusses its benefits, and summarizes a variety of applications by which smart metering and infrastructure supports both planning and operations. Finally, Chapter 18 offers a vision of how smart grid control centers may look in the future.
David E. Bakken
Pullman, Washington
Krzysztof (Kris) Iniewski
Vancouver, British Columbia
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