Commercially available network analysis tools need to be enhanced as the United States grows to rely on renewable energy for electrification of energy consumption, with widespread rooftop solar panels and offshore wind turbine generators, more electric vehicles on the road, and fewer traditional energy production facilities than in previous decades. Enhancing these tools, known as models, will help electric utilities to better understand the risk of wide area blackouts as energy production and consumption patterns shift.
Traditional load flow models include thousands of lines, buses, transformers, generators, and loads. These models accurately represent the steady state operation of the electric energy grid. They fall short, however, when extreme, unlikely, but predictable, events occur. It’s important to remember that these models were developed during the 1960s and 1970s when mainframe computers were state of the art technology, climate change was unheard of, electric vehicles were in the distant future, and air conditioning was only installed in homes owned by the well to do.
Although the 1970s models were a tremendous advancement over previous methods, simplifications have since been introduced to allow results to be produced in less time. Eventually, the 1970s models were adapted for use with today’s desktop computers and laptops, and modified so that results are displayed in seconds on one-line diagrams on video monitors.
With today’s computational capability, traditional load-flow models need to be enhanced to accurately predict the reliability and robustness of the electric energy grid. Plus, traditional load-flow models should be enhanced to predict the performance of niche areas of the electric energy grid. Niche areas could be metropolitan areas that experience a voltage dip when a three-phase fault occurs on a nearby transmission line.
Enhanced models will be developed by electrical engineers and software developers with contributions from meteorologists, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, automotive engineers, and database developers. The contributions of these experts will change load models, but not system configurations.
Enhanced models will allow the implementation of power factor biased, undervoltage load shedding schemes that prevent the collapse of the electric energy grid within a state or across many states.
Enhanced models will provide an added level of assurance that saboteurs cannot create statewide blackouts, unusual weather conditions do not overstress the electric energy grid, and unlikely, but predictable, events are mitigated with minimal customer impacts. Electric utilities’ goal should be to anticipate challenges and initiate corrective actions before challenges become real world events with news media attention. Enhanced models will allow them to achieve this goal.
This is the introduction to a whitepaper of the same name. To receive a full copy of the whitepaper, please email Alyssa Sleva-Horine at [email protected].