Utilities are proactively developing incident management, grid hardening, and disaster recovery and resilience plans in anticipation of extreme grid episodes like what happened recently in UK. Circumstances like weather conditions, physical and cyber attacks, loss of some generation plants, etc.
To cope with such challenges, power transmission and distribution utilities are, by choice or mandate, looking also at alternatives to traditional wires solutions, to meet system needs and defer expensive upgrades.
Both government and industry leaders are increasingly focused on power system resilience. The debate over what the appropriate scope of responsibilities and extent of preventative and remedial actions are has begun with differentiation between resilience and reliability.
When it comes to reliability and resilience, time horizon, predictability, and severity of potential impacts are a few areas of distinction.
• Resilience (extreme and long-lived events): The ability [of the electric system] to withstand and reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events, which includes the capability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from such an event. (FERC Grid Resilience Order, Jan. 8, 2018)
• Reliability (every day): The ability of the electric system to supply the aggregate electric power and energy requirements of the electricity consumers at all times, taking into account scheduled and reasonably expected unscheduled outages of system components (adequacy) and the ability of the electric system to withstand sudden disturbances, such as electric short circuits or unanticipated loss of system components (operating reliability). (NERC, 2018 Long-Term Reliability Assessment, Dec. 20, 2018)
The debate over what the appropriate scope of responsibilities and extent of preventative and remedial actions are has begun with differentiation between resilience and reliability.
Why does it matter? While reliability has always been a focus of FERC and NERC, resilience—particularly involving long-duration events—has implications outside of the industry involving first responders, governmental agencies, and others, in addition to utilities. (NERC)
Getting back to more non-wire solutions to help defeating some costs, and rising the level of contingency, it is believed that the following technologies can play a crucial role in maintaining or increasing the resilience of the grid in the near future:
Predictive awareness tools
- Before any major disruption, cyclic and automatic study of the grid situation and operation planning for contingencies, putting into consideration the renewable generation intermittency and analyzing different scenarios, before and incident can provide a great oversight to the SO, so they can develop counter measures to avoid the disruption.
Time horizon, predictability, and severity of potential impacts are a few areas of distinction.
Situational awareness tools;
- During a major power disruption, it is crucial for SOs to get the right and most up-to-date information regarding the disturbance. In practice, this is still very difficult to achieve.
- Often the required information needs to come from different sources eg. lines sensors, field devices, electrical substations, SCADA and DMS systems.
- Gathering the information is therefore often time consuming and inefficient. So, called situation awareness tools tackle this problem. Such tools gather all required data in real time and present this data in a compressed and targeted way to all involved stakeholders. Situation awareness tools help decision makers to get a good awareness of the actual situation of the power system during a disruption.
Microgrids;
As a MicroGrid can be seen either as a portion of Grid (public or private) or a community of users (producers and consumers), the role of MicroGrid Operators can be very different and referring to different organization:
- DSOs managing a MicroGrid as one or multiple nodes of the electrical public grid. Cascaded grid management is an example of such configuration.
- Private Operators managing a MicroGrid as one or multiple private districts including their energy networks
- Community Managers managing as a MicroGrid only connected users and not the grid itself, providing services like energy optimization and flexibility aggregation
The microgrid is considered as a key provider of services to help DSO to strengthen the resilience of electrical infrastructure against effects of disaster like extreme weather, or to improve normal operational conditions .
Microgrid solutions for DSO are still at early stage, however there are significant volume of research programs, pilots and first deployment on site, supported by large DSOs, and government agencies around the world
Distributed generation
Technologies that cope with the specific behavior of distributed energy sources;
- The application of dispersed generation can help to improve the resilience of distribution networks. A distinction can be made between large units, mainly installed at industrial sites and small units installed at houses.
- Utilities are responsible for system planning and maintaining the reliability, resilience, and safety of the grid, while providing opportunities for DER providers to connect to the grid and offer services
TSO-DSO interaction
Standards like GLDPM, which is Generation and Load Data Provision Methodology. It is the standardized data exchange for the European energy supply. The advancing integration of renewable energies and the increasing interconnection of players in the energy network made an Europe-wide model for standardized data exchange necessary. In addition, various requirements on the local level all the way to the European level must be coordinated. For this purpose, GLDPM defines the framework for capacity planning for transmission of electricity which is already effective since January 2018.
Intelligent networks/Distribution automation
Intelligent networks are networks that apply intelligence to minimize the number and duration of supply interruptions. The intelligent networks are based on data that is coming from the power system.
An example of an intelligent network is the so called self-healing network. Self-healing networks are able to detect faults in the power system and to automatically recover from that while minimizing the outage time. Self-healing networks require changes in the number and type of protection, measurement, switching devices, communication and protocols as well as operational tools for the DSO. The introduction of the self-healing concept can therefore be very expensive.
Intelligent networks have the potential to enable the DSO to optimize the network operation, especially in terms of losses. It is believed that loss reduction could be the driver for larger application of “self-healing” options.
Innovative network management strategies
- Innovative network management strategies involve strategies focusing at minimizing the risks of a power failure.
- Proactive grid management, multidimensional grid management including, Load/generation/unbalance/congestion Forecasting
- Semi to full autonomous grid management practices, instead of having a centralized control system, such systems are controlled by autonomous agents. The control strategy to be applied depends on the actual situation (e.g. normal, congested, post-contingency). For each situation ad-hoc federations of agents are created that execute the desired control strategy. The strategy may cover market based transactions, emergency demand response actions etc. Basically, the control system uses different control level. The level to be used depends on the local operating conditions. The responses to disturbances in the power system are sized proportionally
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