Grid Resiliency: In these days of weather-related disruptions and restorations, how does one ensure the Electric Grid stays safe, reliable and functioning?

To ensure the sustainability of the operation of the power system, it is necessary to develop measures to prepare for adverse events, weather or other disasters. Maintenance must be carried out in a timely and efficient manner. Personnel should be trained and trained in the containment and elimination of emergency situations. Also, emergency teams must be equipped with the necessary consumables and equipment. Unfortunately, in recent years, little attention has been paid to training and equipment and consumables. All this should be in groups, for example, overhead transmission lines, also for those who pass through

Seems to me the reliability of the grid starts with the generating facilities. Those resources need to employ a balanced mix of resources. Therein lies an accelerating problem, particularly when inherently unreliable resources are excessively employed.

Further, having to build more transmission resources to accommodate the growing unreliability of generating resources is not economically wise. Building new transmission lines is expensive while creating undue impacts on the environment.

Grid unreliability problems are largely limited to regions such as California that suffers from politically inflicted interference with sound management of the electrical grid.

Hi, it is my pleasure to attache herewith IEA's steps to that end :

1- Invest in electricity grids enforcement to make them more resilient to extreme weather.

2- Improve the efficiency of cooling equipment to reduce the peak demand and the hourly consumption to avoid load sheddings.

3- Enable the growth of flexible low-carbon power sources to support more solar and wind such as battery storage.

4- Increase other sources of electricity system flexibility such as demand-side response in the buildings sector. Regional integration of electricity systems across national borders will permit load shifting from one grid to another.

5- Accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies for forecasting and situation awareness of extreme weather threats.

Hi Sriram:

A week from today (Aug 19) I will post “PG&E Distribution Hardening”. I have basically completed this, but it is not scheduled for posting until next Thursday. In the interim, the primary reference that I used is described and linked below.

PG&E, “2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan”, https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natural-disaster...

The PG&E document is well over 1,000 pages long, so you may want to wait for the abridged version (my paper), which is only a bit over 3,000 words. I just cover distribution hardening in my paper, but the highest risk comes from distribution. The PG&E document also covers transmission (and many other thing).

-John

Grid reliability is the US is very high: 99.97% as reported by the Galvin Institute and supported by reliability matrices such as SAIDI and SAIFI. These matrices typically discount major system-damaging wind or ice storms or events like wildfires, floods, etc. 

Grid resiliency is the ability to withstand such “high impact-low probability” events with little or no customer outages.  

While we can never “ensure” grid resiliency, planners and engineers can certainly improve reliability and resiliency in many ways to include pole hardening with steel or concrete, greater phase spacing, covered conductors, and undergrounding. 

Undergrounding is becoming increasingly popular especially as the industry evaluates the “life cycle” costs of OH vs UG. 

The cost of 21st century design and construction of underground is coming down with new technologies, means and methods.  Empirical data reported on the FERC Form 1 shows that utilities spend significantly less money on the O&M of underground electric systems versus their overhead systems. Underground clearly has advantages.  Learn more with my whitepaper entitled “The Case for Underground Distribution” at https://mikebeehler.com/whitepaper-the-case-for-underground-distribution/

or https://pdi2.org/white-papers-and-presentations/

Thanks for the great question. The industry is responding!

Sriram, I am going to focus directly on the three critical elements of your question and that is: Safety, Reliability, and Resiliency, which are the most important aspects of managing and operating the grid. Safety ensures that no equipment or personnel damage will be done while operating and maintaining the grid particularly when you integrate renewables, battery storage, microgrids, or add grid automation technologies. Even though we consider DERs as clean and sustainable technologies, they do generate power quality problems such as harmonics because most DERs are inverter-based technologies. So, that impacts the reliability of your system. Reliability has two important parts. One is power quality and the second is reliability indices which are associated with outage duration, frequency, service availability, etc. The vendors or the sellers of DER technologies will hardly ever talk about the power quality issues that these DERs can generate because they think that utility is responsible for taking care of this issue. DER resources can be used very effectively in managing the reliability and resiliency of the system, especially during power outage situations. Battery storage and microgrids are one of the great DER technologies available today to tackle this issue. Today, DERs are tripped offline during power outages. And they don’t need to if you have a microgrid (solar PV, battery, etc.) configuration at each residential level or at the neighborhood level which can further improve the resiliency of the system. Planners need to find out some strategic locations on the feeder where battery storage can be deployed or have mobile battery storage available in the event when there is a power outage.

Engineering and power system studies are of utmost importance to ensure that the feeder has enough hosting capacity. The location of the DERs on the feeder also matters and that needs to be evaluated properly to ensure that it will not create any power quality issues. The grounding of the system both during grid-connected and islanding mode needs to be studied and implemented with appropriate measures to avoid overvoltage and/or other power quality issues. 
 

In my opinion, the reliability and resiliency of the system can be further improved with the adoption of DER technologies, however, more detailed planning and engineering studies need to be performed before we deploy these innovative solutions.

This is a loaded question! I'll attempt to answer this in two ways. First is that utility leaders and regulators need to remember and really commit to their original mission, which despite changes in technologies and markets, hasn't really changed much: providing affordable, reliable, safe electricity (and yes, many have added "sustainable" to their mission statements - more on this in a minute). Their funding, staffing, and personal efforts should reflect this. Frankly, I think that as an industry we have gotten away from this and we are seeing the results...the examples of this - some tragic - are too many to list here, but as a Californian I see these all around me. 

Second, maintaining grid reliability in the coming years is going to be all about how well a utility is able embrace and deploy the necessary technologies to manage the grid in a DER-rich environment (this is the "sustainable" part of their mission statements). The DER-driven changes coming to the grid are mind-boggling. Fortunately there are technologies that have emerged, with some successes behind them, to help manage this new operating environment, most notably DERMS and Net Load Forecasting.

It is possible to operate the grid reliably and safely today while planning for the future. Utilities have been doing this for decades, but of course now the playing field is changing. The utility industry needs to be nimble enough to balance today's needs without compromising its future.

By allowing more distributed energy resources and behind the meter generation to participate in the wholesale energy markets. That's how I see this happening.

Aggregators have so much experience aggregating distributed energy resources including demand response. We need to allow aggregators provide operating reserves in the market place.